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THE PILGRIM'S VISION. 



THE 



INNOCENTS ABROAD, 



OR 



THE IEW PILGRIMS' PROGRESS; 

BEING SOME ACCOUNT OF THE STEAMSHIP QUAKER CITY'S PLEASURE 

EXCURSION TO EUROPE AND THE HOLY LAND; WITH 

DESCRIPTIONS OF COUNTRIES, NATIONS, 

INCIDENTS AND ADVENTURES, 

AS THEY APPEARED 

TO THE 

AUTHOR. 
WITH TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS, 



BY 

MARK TWAIN, 

(SAMUEL L. CLEMENS.) 



BT SUBSCRIPTION ONLY, AND NOT FOR SALS I N THR BOOK-STORES. RKSIDRNTS OF ANY STATB DI 
A COPY IHOULD ADDRRSS TRR PUBLISHERS, AND AN AGENT WILL CALX UPON THRU.) 



HARTFORD, CONN. : 

AMERICAN PUBLISHING COMPANY. 

1888. 



&& 



^b 






Sbtmud aocording to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by 

AMERICAN PUBLISHING CO., 
In the Clerk's Offioe of the District Court of Connection 



382797 

1929 



M.Y Most Patient Reader 

AND 

Most Charitable Critic, 

This Volume is Affectionately 
Inscribed. 



PREFACE 



This book is a record of a pleasure-trip. If it were a record of a 
solemn scientific expedition, it would have about it that gravity > 
that profundity, and that impressive incomprehensibility which are 
so proper to works of that kind, and withal so attractive. Yet not- 
withstanding it is only a record of a pic-nic, it has a purpose, which 
is, to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and 
the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes 
of those who travelled in those countries before him. I make small 
pretence of showing any one how he ought to look at objects of 
interest beyond the sea — other books do that, and therefore, even 
if I were competent to do it, there is no need. 

I offer no apologies for any departures from the usual style of 
travel- writing that may be charged against me — for I think I have 
seen with impartial eyes, and I am sure I have written at least 
honestly, whether wisely or not. 

In this volume I have used portions of letters which I wrote for 
the Daily Alta California, of San Francisco, the proprietors of that 
journal having waived their rights and given me the necessary 
permission. I have also inserted portions of several letters written 
for the "New York Tribune and the New York Herald. 

THE AUTHOR. 

San Francisco, 1869. 




PAOB 

The Quaker City in a Stobm Fbontispieck. ... — 

Illuminated Title-Page— The Pilgrim's Vision — 

"I'll Pay You in Paris " 28 

The Start 30 

" Good Morning, Sir " 34 

The Old Pikate 36 

Dancing Under Difficulties 42 

The Mock Trial 44 

"Land, ho!" 49 

The Capote 52 

Euin and Desolation 53 

Port of Horta, Fayal (Full Page), face page 56 

" Sekki- Yah ! " 59 

Beautiful Stranger 64 

Rock of Gibraltar (Full Page), face page 65 

' Queen's Chair " 6T 

The Ob acle 70 

The Interrogation Point Tl 

Garrison at Malabat T2 

Entertaining an Angel 74 

Yie-w of a Street in Tangier 77 

Change for a Napoleon 81 

The Consul's Family. 88 

" Poet Lariat " 91 

First Supper in France 95 

Painting 96 

Ringing for Soap 99 

"Wine, Sir!" 100 

The Pilgrim 101 

The Prisoner 103 

Homeless France (Full Page), face page. 106 

Railroad Official in France 108 

" Five Minutes for Refreshments." America. 1W 



illustrations. 



vii 



ST. 



PAGE 

"Thirty Minutes foe Dinneb." France. 110 

The Old Travelleb Ill 

A Decided Shave 115 

A Gas-tly Substitute 117 

The Thsee Guides 119 

"Ze SilkMagazin" 122 

Return in War Paint 124 

Napoleon III 126 

Abdul Aziz 126 

TheMobgue 132 

We took a walk 135 

The Can-Can 136 

Graves of Abelabd and Hblowe 141 

A Paie of Canons of 13th Century 142 

The Private Marriage 144 

American Drinks 148 

Eotal Honors to a Yankee. 150 

The Grisette 151 

Fountain at Versailles 154 

Women of Genoa 161 

Petrified Lackey 163 

Priest and Feiab 164 

Statue of Columbus 168 

Geaves of Sixty Thousand 169 

Eoof and Spires of Cathedral at Milan (Full Page), face page 172 

Central Door of Cathedeal at Milan 178 

Interior of Cathedral at Milan 174 

Boyhood's Experience 176 

Treasures of the Cathedral 179 

Cathedeal at Milan 181 

La Scala Theatee 184 

Copying from Old Masters 191 

Facial Expression 194 

The Echo 196 

Note Book 197 

A Kiss for a Franc 198 

The Fumigation 200 

Lake Como 202 

Garden, Lake Como (Full Page), Face Page 204 

Social Driver 207 

Wayside Shrine 208 

Peace and Happiness 209 

Castle of Count Luigi 210 

The Wicked Brother 216 

Disgusted Gondoliee 229 

Cathedral of St. Mark 226 

The Peg 229 

" Good-by " 239 

m'sieur gor-r-dong 234 

Monument to the Doge 236 

St. Mark. By the Old Mastees 238 

St. Matthew. By the Old Mastees 238 

St. Jerome. By the Old Masters , 238 

St. Sebastian. By the Old Masters 239 

St. Unknown. By the Old Masters 289-^ 



viii Jllustrations. 



FA«B 

89. Eialto Bridge 241 

90. Bridge of Sighs 241 

91. Florence 245 

92. The Pensioner 246 

93. " I Want to go Home " 248 

94. The Leaning Tower 250 

95. The Contrast 258 

96. Italian Pastimes 263 

97. Incendiary Document 264 

98. A Koman of 1869 26T 

99. Mamertine Prison 276 

100. Old Eoman 278 

101. Coliseum of Ancient Eome 281 

102. Did not Complain 285 

103. Humboldt House 286 

104. Dan 288 

105. Bronze Statue 289 

106. Penmanship , , 291 

107. On a Bust 293 

108. Yaults of the Convent 299 

109. Dried Convent Fruits 302 

110. At the Store 303 

111. At Home 304 

112. Soothing the Pilgrims , 309 

113. Ascent of Mt. Vesuvius 313 

114 Bat of Naples 311 

115. The Mustang 319 

116. Island of Capri 320 

117. Blue Grotto 321 

118. Vesuvius and Bay of Naples (Full Page), face page 323 

119. The Descent 325 

120. Eutns, Pompeii 327 

121. Foeum of Justice, Pompeii 330 

122. House, Pompeii 335 

123. Stromboli 338 

124 View of the Acropolis, looking "West 341 

125. "no!" 343 

126. The Assault 344 

127. The Caryatides 346 

12S. The Parthenon (Full Page), face page t 848 

129. We Sidled, not Ean 350 

130. Ancient Acropolis 352 

131. Tail Piece, Euins 353 

132. Queen of Greece 355 

133. Palace at Athens 356 

134. Street Scene ln Constantinople (Full Page) face page 359 

135. Goose Eancher 360 

136. Mosque of St. Sophia. 363 

137. Turkish Mausoleum 365 

138. Slandered Dogs 371 

139. The Censor on Duty 374 

140. Turkish Bath 378 

141. Far- Away-Moses 382 

142. A Feagment 885 

143. Tall-Piece— A Memento 886 



^lustrations. ix 

PAGE 

144. Yalta from the Emperor's Palace 392 

145. Emperok of Russia 398 

146. Tinsel King 399 

147. Ship Emperok 404 

148. The Reception 405 

149. Street Scene in Smyrna 411 

150. Smyrna. 413 

151. An Apparent Success 416 

152. Drifting to Starboard , 419 

153. A Spoiled Nap 420 

154 Ancient Amphitheatre at Ephesus 424 

155. Modern Amphitheatre at Ephesus. 423 

156. Ruins of Ephesus 424 

157. The Journey. 425 

158. Graves of the Seven Sleepers 429 

159. The Selection 434 

160. Camping Out 436 

161. Tail Piece— Arabs' Tents 437 

162. A Good Feeder. 439 

163. Interesting Fete 440 

164. Sunday School Grapes 442 

165. An Old Fogy 445 

166. Race with a Camel 446 

167. Temple of the Sun 447 

168. Ruins of Baalbec 449 

169. Hewn Stones in Quarry 450 

170. Mercy 452 

171. Patron Saint 453 

172. Water Carrier 455 

173. View of Damascus, (Full Page) face page 456 

174. Street Cars of Damascus 460 

175. Full Dressed Tourist 466 

176. Impromptu Hospital 474 

177. The Horse " Baalbec "... 476 

178. Oak of Bashan 479 

179. Dangerous Arab 482 

180. Grimes on the War-Path 483 

181. Tail-Piece — Bedouin Camp 487 

182. Home of Ancient Pomp 489 

183. Jack 49© 

184. A Disappointed Audience 491 

185. Fig-Tree 495 

186. " Fare too High " 497 

187. Syrian House 504 

188. Tiberias and Sea of Galilee 506 

189. The Guard 518 

190. Mount Tabor 521 

191. Tail-Piece— Gathebinq Fuel 524 

192. Fountain of the Virgin 530 

193. " Madonna-like Beauty " 531 

194. Putnam Outdone 533 

195. The Bastinado 535 

196. "IWept" 53b 

197. Want of Dignity 539 

198. An Oriental Well 544 



Illustrations. 



PAGE 

199. Arabs Saluting 545 

200. Free Sons of the Desert 545 

201. Sheciikm 552 

202. Tail Piece — Gate of Jerusalem 556 

203. Beggars in Jerusalem 559 

204. Church of the Holy Sepulchre 564 

205. Grave of Adam 566 

206. Yiew of Jerusalem (Full Page), face page 574 

207. The Wandering Jew . . 577 

20S. Mosque of Omar 581 

209. An Epidemic -,8) 

210. Charge on Bedouins 590 

211. Dead Sea 594 

212. Grotto of the Nativity (Full Page), face page 601 

213. Jaffa (Full Page), face page 606 

214. Rear Elevation of Jack 610 

215. Street in Alexandria 611 

216. Viceroy of Egypt r. R12 

217. Eastern Monarch 614 

218. Moses S. Beach 615 

219. Room No. 15 617 

220. The Nilometer 620' 

•_21 Ascent of the Pyramids 622 

222 High Hopes Frustrated 625 

223 King's Chamber in the Pyramid, (Full Page), face page 626 

224. A Powerful Argument 627 

225. Pyramids and Sphynx, (Full Page), face page 629 

226. The Relic Hunter - 630 

227 The Mameluke's Leap -631 

228. Would not be Comforted 633 

229. Tail Piece, The Traveler 634 

230 Homeward Bound 635 

231. Bad Coffee 639 

232 Our Friends the Bermudians Q40 

233. Captain Duncan 641 

234 Tul Piece.Flnis 651 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

Popular Talk of the Excursion — Programme of the Trip — Duly Ticketed for the 

Excursion — Defection of the Celebrities 19 

CHAPTER II. 

Grand Preparations — An Imposing Dignitary — The European Exodus — Mr. 
Blucher's Opinion — Stateroom No. 10 — The Assembling of the Clans — At 
Sea at last 26 

CHAPTER III. 

" Averaging " the Passengers — " Far, far at Sea " — Tribulation among the 
Patriarchs — Seeking Amusement under Difficulties — Five Captains in the 
Ship 32 

CHAPTER IV. 

The Pilgrims Becoming Domesticated — Pilgrim Life at Sea — " Horse-Billiards " 
— The "Synagogue" — The Writing School — Jack's "Journal" — The 
" Q. C. Club "—The Magic Lantern— State Ball on Deck— Mock Trials- 
Charades — Pilgrim Solemnity — Slow Music — The Executive Officer De- 
livers an Opinion 38 

CHAPTER Y. 

Summer in Mid- Atlantic — An Eccentric Moon — Mr. Blucher Loses Confidence 
— The Mystery of "Ship Time" — The Denizens of the Deep — "Land- 
Hol" — The First Landing on a Foreign Shore — Sensation among the 
Natives — Something about the Azores Islands- -Blucher's Disastrous Din- 
ner — The Happy Result 41 

CHAPTER YI. 

Solid Information — A Fossil Community — Curious Ways and Customs— Jesuit 
Humbuggery — Fantastic Pilgrimizing — Origin of the Russ Pavement — 
Squaring Accounts with the Fossils — At Sea Again 55 

CHAPTER VII. 

A Tempest at Night — Spain and Africa on Exhibition — Greeting a Majestic 
Stranger — The Pillars of Hercules — The Rock of Gibraltar — Tiresome 
Repetition — " The Queen's Chair " — Serenity Conquered — Curiosities of 
the Secret Caverns — Personnel of Gibraltar — Some Odd Characters — A 
Private Frolic in Africa — Bearding a Moorish Garrison (without loss of 
life) — Vanity Rebuked — Disembarking in the Empire of Morocco 62 



xii Contents. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

PAQB 

The Ancient City of Tangier, Morocco — Strange Sights — A Cradle of An- 
tiquity — We become Wealthy — How they Rob the Mail in Africa — The 
Danger of being Opulent in Morocco 76 

CHAPTER IX. 

A Pilgrim in Deadly Peril — How they Mended the Clock — Moorish Punish- 
ments for Crime — Marriage Customs — Looking Several ways for Sunday — 
Shrewd Practice of Mohammedan Pilgrims — Reverence for Cats — Bliss of 
being a Consul-General 83 

CHAPTER X. 

Fourth of July at Sea — Mediterranean Sunset — The " Oracle " is Delivered of 
an Opinion — Celebration Ceremonies — The Captain's Speech — France in 
Sight — The Ignorant Native — In Marseilles — Another Blunder — Lost in 
the Great City — Found Again — A Frenchy Scene 90 

CHAPTER XL 

Getting "Used to it " — No Soap — Bill of Fare, Table d'hote — "An American 
Sir!" — A Curious Discovery — The "Pilgrim" Bird — Strange Companion- 
ship — A Grave of the Living — A Long Captivity — Some of Dumas' He- 
roes — Dungeon of the Famous " Iron Mask." 98 

CHAPTER XII. 

A Holiday Flight through France — Summer Garb of the Landscape — Abroad 
on the Great Plains— Peculiarities of French Cars — French Politeness — 
American Railway Officials — "Twenty Mnutes to Dinner!" — Why there 
are no Accidents — The "Old Travellers" — Still on the Wing — Paris at 
Last — French Order and Quiet — Place of the Bastile — Seeing the Sights 
— A Barbarous Atrocity — Absurd Billiards , 105 

CHAPTER Xin. 

More Trouble — Monsieur Billfinger— Re-Christening the Frenchman — In the 
Clutches of a Paris Guide — The International Exposition — Fine Military 
Review — Glimpse of the Emperor Napoleon and the Sultan of Turkey. ... 118 

CHAPTER XIV. 

The Venerable Cathedral of Notre-Dame — Jean Sanspeur's Addition — Treas- 
ures and Sacred Relics — The Legend of the Cross — The Morgue — The 
Outrageous Can- Can — Blondin Aflame — The Louvre Palace — The Great 
Park — Showy Pageantry — Preservation of Noted Things 130 

CHAPTER XV. 

French National Burying-Ground — Among the Great Dead — The Shrine of 
Disappointed Love — The Story of Abelard and Heloise — " English Spoken 
Here " — " American Drinks Compounded Here " — Imperial Honors to an 
American — The Over-estimated Grisette — Departure from Paris — A De- 
liberate Opinion Concerning the Comeliness of American Women 139 

CHAPTER XVI. 

Versailles — Paradise Regained — A Wonderful Park — Paradise Lost — Napole- 
onic Strategy . - 153 



Contents. xiii 

CHAPTER XYIL 

PAGE 

"War — The American Forces Victorious — "Home Again" — Italy in Sight — 
The " City of Palaces " — Beauty of the Genoese Women— The " Stub- 
Hunters " — Among the Palaces — G-ifted Guide — Church Magnificence — 
" "WOmen not Admitted " — How the Genoese Live — Massive Architecture 
— A Scrap of Ancient History— Graves for 60,000 159 

CHAPTER XYIII. 

Mying Through Italy — Marengo — First Glimpse of the Famous Cathedral — 
Description of some of its Wonders — A Horror Carved in Stone — An 
Unpleasant Adventure— A Good Man — A Sermon from the Tomb- 
Tons of Gold and Silver — Some More Holy Relics — Solomon's Temple 
Rivalled 1 7 1 

CHAPTER XIX. 

"Do You Wis zo Haut can be? " — La Scala — Petrarch and Laura — Lucrezia 
Borgia — Ingenious Frescoes — Ancient Roman Amphitheatre — A Clever 
Delusion — Distressing Billiards — The Chief Charm of European Life — An 
Italian Bath — Wanted : Soap — Crippled French — Mutilated English — The 
Most Celebrated Painting in the World — Amateur Raptures — Uninspired 
Critics — Anecdote — A Wonderful Echo — A Kiss for a Franc 183 

CHAPTER XX. 

Rural Italy by Rail — Fumigated, According to Law — The Sorrowing English- 
man — Night by the Lake of Como — The Famous Lake — Its Scenery — 
Como compared with Tahoe — Meeting a Shipmate 199 

CHAPTER XXL 

The Pretty Lago di Lecco — A Carriage Drive in the Country — Astonishing 
Sociability in a Coachman — A Sleepy Land — Bloody Shrines — The Heart 
and Home of Priestcraft — A Thrilling Mediaeval Romance — The Birthplace 
of Harlequin — Approaching Venice 207 

CHAPTER XXII. 

Night in Venice — The " Gay Gondolier " — The Grand Fete by Moonlight — The 
Notable Sights of Venice — The Mother of the Republics Desolate 217 

CHAPTER XXIII. 

The Famous Gondola — The Gondola in an Unroraantic Aspect — The Great 
Square of St. Mark and the Winged Lion — Snobs, at Home and Abroad — 
Sepulchres of the Great Dead — A Tilt at the " Old Masters " — A Contra- 
band Guide — The Conspiracy — Moving Again 228 

CHAPTER XXrV. 

Down Through Italy by Rail — Idling in Florence — Dante and Galileo — An 
Ungrateful City — Dazzling Generosity — Wonderful Mosaics — The Histori- 
cal Arno — Lost Again — Found Again, but no Fatted Calf Ready — The 
Leaning Tower of Pisa— The Ancient Duomo — The Old Original First 
Pendulum that Ever Swung — An Enchanting Echo — A New Holy 
Sepulchre — A Relic of Antiquity — A Fallen Republic — At Leghorn — A.t 
Home Again, and Satisfied, on Board the Ship — Our Vessel an Object of 
Grave Suspicion — Gen. Garibaldi Visited — Threats of Quarantine 244 



xiv Contents. 

CHAPTER XXV. 



PAG* 



The Works of Bankruptcy — Railway Grandeur — How to Fill an Empty 
Treasury — The Sumptuousness of Mother Church — Ecclesiastical Splen- 
dor — Magnificence and Misery — General Execration — More Magnificence 
— A Good "Word for the Priests — Civita Vecchia the Dismal — Off for 
Rome 255 

CHAPTER XXYI. 

The Modern Roman on His Travels — The Grandeur of St. Peter's — Holy Relics 
— Grand View from the Dome — The Holy Inquisition — Interesting Old 
Monkish Frauds — The Ruined Coliseum — The Coliseum in the Days of 
its Prime — Ancient Play-bill of a Coliseum Performance — A Roman 
Newspaper Criticism 1700 Years Old 266 

CHAPTER XXVII. 

" Butchered to Make a Roman Holiday " — The Man who Never Complained 
— An Exasperating Subject — Asinine Guides — The Roman Catacombs — 
The Saint Whose Fervor Burst his Ribs — The Miracle of the Bleeding 
Heart — The Legend of Ara Cceli 284 

CHAPTER XXVHI. 

Picturesque Horrors — The Legend of Brother Thomas — Sorrow Scientifically 
Analyzed — A Festive Company of the Dead — The Great Vatican Museum 
— Artist Sins of Omission — The Rape of the Sabines — Papal Protection of 
Art — High Price of " Old Masters " — Improved Scripture — Scale of Rank 
of the Holy Personages in Rome — Scale of Honors Accorded Them— Fos- 
silizing — Away for Naples 298 

CHAPTER XXLX. 

Naples — In Quarantine at Last — Annunciation — Ascent of Mount Vesuvius 
— A Two-Cent Community — The Black Side of Neapolitan Character — 
Monkish Miracles — Ascent of Mount Vesuvius Continued — The Stranger 
and the Hackman — Night View of Naples from the Mountain-side — 
Ascent of Vesuvius Continued 308 

CHAPTER XXX. 

Ascent of Vesuvius Continued — Beautiful View at Dawn — Less Beautiful 
View in the Back Streets — Ascent of Vesuvius Continued — Dwellings a 
Hundred Feet High — A Motley Procession — Bill of Fare for a Pedler's 
Breakfast — Princely Salaries — Ascent of Vesuvius Continued — An Aver- 
age of Prices— The Wonderful "Blue Grotto "—Visit to Celebrated 
Localities in the Bay of Naples — The Poisoned " Grotto of the Dog " — A 
Petrified Sea of Lava — The Ascent Continued — The Summit Reached — 
Description of the Crater — Descent of Vesuvius 31S 

CHAPTER XXXI. 

The Buried City of Pompeii — How Dwellings Appear that have been Unoccu- 
pied for Eighteen Hundred Years — The Judgment Seat — Desolation — The 
Footprints of the Departed — "No Women Admitted" — Theatres, Bake- 
shops, Schools, etc. — Skeletons Preserved by the Ashes and Cinders — The 
Brave Martyr to Duty — Rip Van Winkle— The Perishable Nature of 
Fame 327 



Contents. xy 

CHAPTER XXXII. 

PASS 

At Sea Once More — The Pilgrims all Well — Superb Stromboli — Sicily by 
Moonlight— Scylla and Charybdis— The " Oracle " at Fault— Skirting the 
Isles of Greece — Ancient Athens — Blockaded by Quarantine and Refused 
Permission to Enter — Running the Blockade — A Bloodless Midnight Ad- 
venture — Turning Robbers from Necessity — Attempt to Carry the Acrop- 
olis by Storm — We Fail — AmoDg the Glories of the Past — A World of 
Ruined Sculpture — A Fairy Vision — Famous Localities — Retreating in 
G-ood Order — Captured by the Guards — Travelling in MDitary State— Safe 
on Board Again 337 

CHAPTER XXXTTL 

Modern Greece — Fallen Greatness — Sailing Through the Archipelago and the 
Dardanelles — Footprints of History — The First Shoddy Contractor of 
whom History gives any Account — Anchored Before Constantinople — 
Fantastic Fashions — The Ingenious Goose-Rancher — Marvellous Cripples 
— The Great Mosque — The Thousand and One Columns — The Grand 
Bazaar of Stamboul 354 

CHAPTER XXXIY. 

Scarcity of Morals and Whiskey — Slave-Girl Market Report — Commercial 
Morality at a Discount — The Slandered Dogs of Constantinople — Ques- 
tionable Delights of Newspaperdom in Turkey — Ingenious Italian 
Journalism — No More Turkish Lunches Desired — The Turkish Bath 
Fraud — The Narghileh Fraud — Jackplaned by a Native — The Turkish 
Coffee EWd 368 

CHAPTER XXXY. 

Sailing Through the Bosporus and the Black Sea — " Far- Away Moses " — 
Melancholy Sebastopol — Hospitably Received in Russia — Pleasant Eng- 
lish People — Desperate Fighting — Relic Hunting — How Travellers Form 
" Cabinets " 381 

CHAPTER XXXYI. 

Nine Thousand Miles East — Imitation American Town in Russia — Gratitude 

that Came Too Late — To Yisit the Autocrat of All the Russias 38 1 

CHAPTER XXXVIL 

Summer Home of Royalty — Practising for the Dread Ordeal — Committee on 
Imperial Address — Reception by the Emperor and Family — Dresses of 
the Imperial Party — Concentrated Power — Counting the Spoons — At the 
Grand Duke's — A Charming Villa — A Knightly Figure — The Grand 
Duchess — A Grand Ducal Breakfast — Baker's Boy, the Famine-Breeder — 
Theatrical Monarchs a Fraud — Saved as by Fire — The Governor-Gen- 
eral's Visit to the Ship — Official "Style " — Aristocratic Visitors — "Mun- 
chausenizing " with Them — Closing Ceremonies 390 

CHAPTER XXXVHL 

Return to Constantinople — We Sail for Asia — The Sailors Burlesque the 
Imperial Visitors — Ancient Smyrna, — The " Oriental Splendor " Fraud — 
The " Biblical Crown of Life " — Pilgrim Prophecy-Savans — Sociable 
Armenian Girls — A Sweet Reminiscence—" The Camels are Coming, 
Ha-ha ! " 403 



xvi Contents. 

CHAPTER XXXIX. 

PAGK 

Smyrna's Lions — The Martyr Polycarp — The " Seven Churches " — Remains 
of the Six Smyrnas — Mysterious Oyster Mine — Oysters Seeking Scen- 
ery — A Millerite Tradition — A Railroad Out of its Sphere 412 

CHAPTER XL. 

Journeying Toward Ancient Ephesus — Ancient Ayassalook — -The Yillanous 
Donkey — A Fantastic Procession — Bygone Magnificence — Fragments of 
History — The Legend of the Seven Sleepers 418 

CHAPTER XLI. 

Vandalism Prohibited — Angry Pilgrims — Approaching Holy Land! — The 
" Shrill Note of Preparation — Distress About Dragomans and Transporta- 
tion — The "Long Route" Adopted — In Syria — Something about Beirout 
-A Choice Specimen of a Greek " Ferguson " — Outfits — Hideous Horse- 
flesh—Pilgrim " Style "—What of Aladdin's Lamp ? 430 

CHAPTER XLII. 

'•Jacksonville," in the Mountains of Lebanon — Breakfasting above a Grand 
Panorama — The Vanished City — The Peculiar Steed, " Jericho " — The 
Pilgrim's Progress — Bible Scenes — Mount Hermon, Joshua's Battle- 
Fields, etc.— The Tomb of Noah— A Most Unfortunate People 438 

CHAPTER XLIII. 

Patriarchal Customs — Magnificent Baalbec — Description of the Ruins — Scrib- 
bling Smiths and Joneses — Pilgrim Fidelity to the Letter of the Law — The 
Revered Fountain of Baalam's Ass 445 

CHAPTER XLIV. 

Extracts from Note-Book — Mahomet's Paradise and the Bible's — Beautiful Da- 
mascus, the Oldest City on Earth — Oriental Scenes within the Curious Old 
City — Damascus Street Car — The Story of St. Paul — The " Street called 
Straight " — Mahomet's Tomb and St. George's — The Christian Massacre — 
Mohammedan Dread of Pollution — The House of Naaman — The Horrors 
of Leprosy 454 

CHAPTER XLV. 

The Cholera by way of Variety — Hot — Another Outlandish Procession — Pen- 
and-ink Photograph of " Jonesborough," Syria — Tomb of Nimrod, the 
Mighty Hunter — The Stateliest Ruin of All — Stepping over the Borders 
of Holy Land — Bathing in the Sources of Jordan — More " Specimen "- 
Hunting — Ruins of Cesarea-Philippi — " On This Rock Will I Build my 
Church "—The People the Disciples Knew— The Noble Steed " Baalbec " 
— Sentimental Horse Idolatry of the Arabs , 465 

CHAPTER XLVI. 

Dan — Bashan — Genessaret — A Notable Panorama — Smallness of Palestine — 
Scraps of History — Character of the Country — Bedouin Shepherds — 
Glimpses of the Hoary Past — Mr. Grimes's Bedouins — A Battle-Ground 
of Joshua — That Soldier's Manner of Fighting — Barak's Battle — The 
Necessity of Unlearning Some Things — Desolation 478 



Contents. xvii 

CHAPTER XLYH. 

PA«K 

Jack's Adventure — Joseph's Pit — The Story of Joseph — Joseph's Magnanim- 
ity and Esau's — The Sacred Lake of Genessaret — Enthusiasm of the Pil- 
grims — Why We did not Sail on Galilee — About Capernaum — Concerning 
the Saviour's Brothers and Sisters — Journeying toward Magdala 488 

CHAPTER XLYIII. 

Curious Specimens of Art and Architecture — Public Reception of the Pilgrims 
— Mary Magdalen's House — Tiberias and its Queer Inhabitants — The Sa- 
cred Sea of Galilee — Galilee by Night 503 

CHAPTER XLIX. 

The Ancient Baths — Ye Apparition — A Distinguished Panorama, — The Last 
Battle of the Crusades — The Story of the Lord of Kerak — Mount Tabor — 
What one Sees from its Top — A Memory of a Wonderful Garden — The 
House of Deborah the Prophetess 514 

CHAPTER L. 

Toward Nazareth — Bitten By a Camel — Grotto of the Aununciation, Nazareth 
— Noted Grottoes in General — Joseph's Workshop — A Sacred Bowlder — 
The Fountain of the Yirgin — Questionable Female Beauty — Literary Cu- 
riosities 525 

CHAPTER LI. 

The Boyhood of the Saviour — Unseemly Antics of Sober Pilgrims — Home of 
the Witch of Endor — Nain — Profanation — A Popular Oriental Picture- 
Biblical Metaphors Becoming steadily More Intelligible — The Shunem 
Miracle — The "Free Son of The Desert" — Ancient Jezreel — Jehu's 
Achievements — Samaria and its Famous Siege 531 

CHAPTER LH. 

A. Curious Remnant of the Past — Shechem — The Oldest " First Family " on 
Earth — The Oldest Manuscript Extant — The Genuine Tomb of Joseph — 
Jacob's Well — Shiloh — Camping with the Arabs — Jacob's Ladder — More 
Desolation — Ramah, Beroth, the Tomb of Samuel, the Fountain of Beira 
— Impatience — Approaching Jerusalem — The Holy City in Sight — Noting 
its Prominent Features — Domiciled Within the Sacred Walls 561 

CHAPTER LIII. 

w The Joy of the Whole Earth" — Description of Jerusalem — Church of the 
Holy Sepulchre — The Stone of Unction — The Grave of Jesus — Graves 
of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea — Places of the Apparition — The 
Finding of the Three Crosses— The Legend — Monkish Impostures — The 
Pillar of Flagellation— The Place of a Relic— Godfrey's Sword—" The 
Bonds of Christ "— " The Center of the Earth "—Place whence the Dust 
was taken of which Adam was Made — Grave of Adam — The Martyred 
Soldier — The Copper Plate that was On the Cross — The Good St. Helena 
— Place of the Division of the Garments — St. Dimas, the Penitent Thief — 
The Late Emperor Maximilian's Contribution — Grotto wherein the Crosses 
were Found, and the Nails, and the Crown of Thorns — Chapel of the 
Mocking — Tomb of Melchizedek — Graves of Two Renowned Crusaders 
— The Place of the Crucifixion 558 



xviii Contents. 

CHAPTER LIY. 

PAGB 

The " Sorrowful Way " — The Legend of St. Veronica's Handkerchief— An II- 
lustrious Stone — House of the "Wandering Jew — The Tradition of the 
Wanderer — Solomon's Temple — Mosque of Omar — Moslem Traditions — 
"Women not Admitted" — The Fate of a Gossip — Turkish Sacred Relics 
— Judgment Seat of David and Saul — Genuine Precious Remains of 
Solomon's Temple — Surfeited with Sights — The Pool of Siloam — The Gar- 
den of Gethsemane and Other Sacred Localities 57 

CHAPTER LY. 

Rebellion in the Camp — Charms of Nomadic Life — Dismal Rumors — En Route 
for Jericho and The Dead Sea — Pilgrim Strategy — Bethany and the Dwell- 
ing of Lazarus — "Bedouins!" — Ancient Jericho — Misery — The Night 
March — The Dead Sea — An Idea of What a "Wilderness " in Palestine is 
— The Holy Hermits of Mars Saba — Good St. Saba — Women not Admit- 
ted — Buried from the World for all Time — Unselfish Catholic Benevolence 
— Gazelles — The Plain of the Shepherds — Birthplace of the Saviour, 
Bethlehem — Church of the Nativity — Its Hundred Holy Places — The Fa- 
mous " Milk " Grotto — Tradition — Return to Jerusalem — Exhausted. . . . 686 

CHAPTER LVI. 

Departure from Jerusalem — Samson — The Plain of Sharon — Arrival at Joppa 
— House of Simon the Tanner — The Long Pilgrimage Ended — Character 
of Palestine Scenery — The Curse 604 

CHAPTER LVH. 

The Happiness of being at Sea once more — " Home " as it is in a Pleasure- 
Ship — "Shaking Hands "with the Yessel — Jack in Costume — His Fa- 
ther's Parting Advice — Approaching Egypt — Ashore in Alexandria — A 
Deserved Compliment for the Donkeys — Invasion of the Lost Tribes of 
America — End of the Celebrated "Jaffa Colony" — Scenes in Grand Cai- 
ro — Shepheard's Hotel Contrasted with a Certain American Hotel — Pre- 
paring for the Pyramids 609 

CHAPTER LVIII. 

"Recherche " Donkeys — A Wild Ride — Specimens of Egyptian Modesty — Mo- 
ses in the Bulrushes — Place where the Holy Family Sojourned — Distant 
view of the Pyramids — A Nearer View — The Ascent — Superb View 
from the top of the Pyramid — "Backsheesh! Backsheesh! " — An Arab 
Exploit — In the Bowels of the Pyramid — Strategy — Reminiscence of 
"Holiday's Hill"— Boyish Exploit— The Majestic Sphynx— Things the 
Author will not Tell— Grand Old Egypt 61S 

CHAPTER LIX. 

Going Home — A Demoralized Note-Book — A Boy's Diary — Mere Mention of 
Old Spain — Departure from Cadiz — A Deserved Rebuke — The Beautiful 
Madeiras — Tabooed — In the Delightful Bermudas — An English Welcome 
— Good-by to " Our Friends the Bermudians " — Packing Trunks for Home 
— Our First Accident — The Long Cruise Drawing to a Close — At Home 
Amen • 636 

CHAPTER LX. 
Thankless Devotion — A Newspaper Valedictory — Conclusion. 638 



OHAPTEE I. 

FOE months the great Pleasure Excursion to Europe and 
the Holy Land was chatted about in the newspapers 
every where in America, and discussed at countless firesides. 
It was a novelty in the way of Excursions — its like had not 
been thought of before, and it compelled that interest which 
attractive novelties always command. It was to be a picnic 
on a gigantic scale. The participants in it, instead of freight- 
ing an ungainly steam ferry-boat with youth and beauty and 
pies and doughnuts, and paddling up some obscure creek to 
disembark upon a grassy lawn and wear themselves out with 
a long summer day's laborious frolicking under the impression 
that it was fun, were to sail away in a great steamship with 
flags flying and cannon pealing, and take a royal holiday 
beyond the broad ocean, in many a strange clime and in many 
a land renowned in history! They were to sail for months 
over the breezy Atlantic and the sunny Mediterranean ; they 
were to scamper about the decks by day, filling the ship with 
shouts and laughter — or read novels and poetry in the shade 
of the smoke-stacks, or watch for the jelly-fish and the nau- 
tilus, over the side, and the shark, the whale, and other strange 
monsters of the deep ; and at night they were to dance in the 
open air, on the upper deck, in the midst of a ball-room that 
stretched from horizon to horizon, and was domed by the bend- 
ing heavens and lighted by no meaner lamps than the stars 
and the magnificent moon — dance, and promenade, and 
smoke, and sing, and make love, and search the skies for con- 
stellations that never associate with the " Big Dipper " they 



20 A SEDUCTIVE PROGRAMME. 

were so tired of : and they were to see the ships of twenty 
navies — tiie customs and costumes of twenty curious peoples 
— the great cities of half a world — they were to hob-nob with 
nobility and hold friendly converse with kings and princes, 
Grand Moguls, and the anointed lords of mighty empires ! 

It was a brave conception ; it was the offspring of a most 
ingenious brain. It was well advertised, but it hardly needed 
it : the bold originality, the extraordinary character, the seduc- 
tive nature, and the vastness of the enterprise provoked com- 
ment every where and advertised it in every household in the 
land. Who could read the programme of the excursion with- 
out longing to make one of the party ? I will insert it here. 
It is almost as good as a map. As a text for this book, noth- 
ing could be better : 



EXCURSION TO THE HOLY LAND, EGYPT, THE CRIMEA, GREECE, 
AND INTERMEDIATE POINTS OP INTEREST. 

Brooklyn, February 1st, 1867. 

The undersigned will make an excursion as above during the coming season, and 
begs to submit to you the following programme : 

A first-class steamer, to be under his own command, and capable of accommo- 
dating at least one hundred and fifty cabin passengers, will be selected, in which 
will be taken a select company, numbering not more than three-fourths of the ship's 
capacity. There is good reason to believe that this company can be easily made 
up in this immediate vicinity, of mutual friends and acquaintances. 

The steamer will be provided with every necessary comfort, including library and 
musical instruments. 

An experienced physician will be on board. 

Leaving New York about June 1st, a middle and pleasant route will be taken 
across the Atlantic, and passing through the group of Azores, St. Michael will be 
reached in about ten days. A day or two will be spent here, enjoying the fruit and 
■wild scenery of these islands, and the voyage continued, and Gibraltar reached in 
Shree or four days. 

A day or two will be spent here in looking over the wonderful subterraneous 
fortifications, permission to visit these galleries being readily obtained. 

From Gibraltar, running along the coasts of Spain and Prance, Marseilles will be 
reached in three days. Here ample time will be given not only to look over the city, 
which was founded six hundred years before the Christian era, and its artificial port> 
the finest of the kind in the Mediterranean, but to visit Paris during the Great Ex- 
hibition; and the beautiful city of Lyons, lying intermediate, from the heights of 



A SEDUCTIVE PROGRAMME. 21 

which, on a clear day, Mont Blanc and the Alps can be distinctly seen. Passen- 
gers who may wish to extend the time at Paris can do so, and, passing down 
through Switzerland, rejoin the steamer at Genoa. 

Prom Marseilles to Genoa is a run of one night. The excursionists will have an 
opportunity to look over this, the "magnificent city of palaces," and visit the birth- 
place of Columbus, twelve miles off, over a beautiful road built by Napoleon I. 
From this point, excursions may be made to Milan, Lakes Como and Maggiore, of 
to Milan, Verona, (famous for its extraordinary fortifications,) Padua, and Venice. 
Or, if passengers desire to visit Parma (famous for Correggio's frescoes,) and Bo- 
logna, they can by rail go on to Florence, and rejoin the steamer at Leghorn, thus- 
spending about three weeks amid the cities most famous for art in Italy. 

From Genoa the run to Leghorn will be made along the coast in one night, and 
time appropriated to this point in which to visit Florence, its palaces and galleries; 
Pisa, its Cathedral and "Leaning Tower," and Lucca and its baths, and Roman 
amphitheatre ; Florence, the most remote, being distant by rail about sixty miles. 

From Leghorn to Naples, (calling at Civita Vecchia to land any who may prefer 
to go to Rome from that point,) the distance will be made in about thirty-six hours; 
the route will lay along the coast of Italy, close by Caprera, Elba, and Corsica. 
Arrangements have been made to take on board at Leghorn a pilot for Caprera^ 
and, if practicable, a call will be made there to visit the home of Garibaldi. 

Rome, [by rail] Herculaneum, Pompeii, Vesuvius, Virgil's tomb, and possibly, 
the ruins of Psestum, can be visited, as well as the beautiful surroundings of Naples 
and its charming bay. 

The next point of interest will be Palermo, the most beautiful city of Sicily, 
which will be reached in one night from Naples. A day will be spent here, and 
leaving in the evening, the course will be taken towards Athens. 

Skirting along the north coast of Sicily, passing through the group of iEolian 
Isles, in sight of Stromboli and Vulcania, both active volcanoes, through the Straits 
of Messina, with " Scylla " on the one hand and " Charybdis " on the other, along 
the east coast of Sicily, and in sight of Mount ^Etna, along the south coast of Italy, 
the west and south coast of Greece, in sight of ancient Crete, up Athens Gulf, and 
into the Piraeus, Athens will be reached in two and a half or three days. After 
tarrying here awhile, the Bay of Salamis will be crossed, and a day given to Cor- 
inth, whence the voyage will be continued to Constantinople, passing on the way 
through the Grecian Archipelago, the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmora, and the 
mouth of the Golden Horn, and arriving in about forty-eight hours from Athens. 

After leaving Constantinople, the way will be taken out through the beautiful 
Bosphorus, across the Black Sea to Sebastopol and Balaklava, a run of about 
twenty-four hours. Here it is proposed to remain two days, visiting the harbors, 
fortifications, and battle-fields of the Crimea ; thence back through the Bosphorus, 
touching at Constantinople to take in any who may have preferred to remain there; 
down through the Sea of Marmora and the Dardanelles, along the coasts of ancient 
Troy and Lydia in Asia, to Smyrna, which will be reached in two or two and a half 
days from Constantinople. A sufficient stay will be made here to give opportunity 
of visiting Ephesus, fifty miles distant by rail. 

From Smyrna towards the Holy Land the course will lay through the Grecian 



22 A SEDUCTIVE PROGRAMME. 

Archipelago, close by the Isle of Patmos, along the coast of Asia, ancient Pam- 
phylia, and the Isle of Cyprus. Beirout will be reached in three days. At Beirout 
time will be given to visit Damascus; after which the steamer will proceed to 
Joppa. 

From Joppa, Jerusalem, the River Jordan, the Sea of Tiberias, Nazareth, Beth- 
any, Bethlehem, and other points of interest in the Holy Land can be visited, and 
here those who may have preferred to make the journey from Bierout through the 
country, passing through Damascus, Galilee, Capernaum, Samaria, and by the 
River Jordan and Sea of Tiberias, can rejoin the steamer. 

Leaving Joppa, the next point of interest to visit will be Alexandria, which will 
be reached in twenty-four hours. The ruins of Caesar's Palace, Pompey's Pillar, 
Cleopatra's Needle, the Catacombs, and ruins of ancient Alexandria, will be found 
worth the visit. The journey to Cairo, one hundred and thirty miles by rail, can be 
made in a few hours, and from which can be visited the site of ancient Memphis, 
Joseph's Granaries, and the Pyramids. 

From Alexandria the route will be taken homeward, calling at Malta, Cagliari 
(in Sardinia,) and Parma (in Majorca,) all magnificent harbors, with charming 
scenery, and abounding in fruits. 

A day or two will be spent at each place, and leaving Parma in the evening, 
"Valencia in Spain will be reached the next morning. A few days will be spent in 
this, the finest city of Spain. 

From Valencia, the homeward course will be continued, skirting along the coast 
©f Spain. Alicant, Carthagena, Palos, and Malaga, will be passed but a mile or 
two distant, and Gibraltar reached in about twenty-four hours. 

A stay of one day will be made here, and the voyage continued to Madeira, 
which will be reached in about three days. Captain Marryatt writes : " I do not 
know a spot on the globe which so much astonishes and delights upon first arrival 
as Madeira." A stay of one or two days will be made here, which, if time per- 
mits, may be extended, and passing on through the islands, and probably in sight 
of the Peak of Teneriffe, a southern track will be taken, and the Atlantic crossed 
within the latitudes of the Northeast trade winds, where mild and pleasant weather, 
and a smooth sea, can always be expected. 

A call will be made at Bermuda, which lies directly in this route homeward, and 
will be reached in about ten days from Madeira, and after spending a short time 
with our friends the Bermudians, the final departure will be made for home, which 
will be reached in about three days. 

Already, applications have been received from parties in Europe wishing to joim 
the Excursion there. 

The ship will at all times be a home, where the excursionists, if sick, will be sur- 
rounded by kind friends, and have all possible comfort and sympathy. 

Should contagious sickness exist in any of the ports named in the programme, 
such ports will be passed, and others of interest substituted. 

The price of passage is fixed at $1,250, currency, for each adult passenger. 
Choice of rooms and of seats at the tables apportioned in the order in which pas- 
sages are engaged, and no passage considered engaged until ten per cent, of the 
passage money is deposited with the treasurer. 



A SEDUCTIVE PROGRAMME. 23 

Passengers can remain on board of the steamer, at all ports, if they desire, with- 
out additional expense, and all boating at the expense of the ship. 

All passages must be paid for when taken, in order that the most perfect 
arrangements be made for starting at the appointed time. 

Applications for passage must be approved by the committee before tickets are 
issued, and can be made to the undersigned. 

Articles of interest or curiosity, procured by the passengers during the voyage, 
may be brought home in the steamer free of charge. 

Five dollars per day, in gold, it is believed, will be a fair calculation to make for 
aU traveling expenses on shore, and at the various points where passengers may 
wish to leave the steamer for days at a time. 

The trip can be extended, and the route changed, by unanimous vote of the 
passengers. 

CHAS. C. DUNCAN, 

117 Wall Street, New York. 
R. R. G******, Treasurer. 

Committee on Applications. 
J. T. H***** Esq., R. R. G***** Esq., C. C. DUNCAN. 

Committee on selecting Steamer. 
Capt. W. W. S****. Surveyor for Board of Underwriters. 
C. W. 0*******, Consulting Engineer for U. S. and Canada. 
j T. h*****, Esq. 
C. C. DUNCAN. 

P. S. — The very beautiful and substantial side wheel steamship " Quaker City" 
has been chartered for the occasion, and will leave New York, June 8th. Letters 
have been issued by the government commending the party to courtesies abroad. 

What was there lacking about that programme, to make it 
perfectly irresistible ? Nothing, that any finite mind could 
discover. Paris, England, Scotland, Switzerland, Italy — 
Garibaldi ! The Grecian archipelago ! Vesuvius ! Constanti- 
nople ! Smyrna ! The Holy Land ! Egypt and " our friends 
the Bermudians !" People in Europe desiring to join the Ex- 
cursion — contagious sickness to be avoided — boating at the 
expense of the ship — physician on board — the circuit of the 
globe to be made if the passengers unanimously desired it — ■ 
the company to be rigidly selected by a pitiless " Committee 
on Applications " — the vessel to be as rigidly selected by 
as pitiless a " Committee on Selecting Steamer." Human 



24 ENROLLED AMONG THE 

nature could not withstand these bewildering temptations. I 
hurried to the Treasurer's office and deposited my ten per 
cent. I rejoiced to know that a few vacant state-rooms were 
still left. I did avoid a critical personal examination into mj 
character, by that bowelless committee, but I referred to all 
the people of high standing I could think of in the community 
who would be least likely to know any thing about me. 

Shortly a supplementary programme was issued which set 
forth that the Plymouth Collection of Hymns would be used 
on board the ship. I then paid the balance of my passage 
money. 

I was provided with a receipt, and duly and officially ac- 
cepted as an excursionist. There was happiness in that, but 
it was tame compared to the novelty of being " select." 

This supplementary programme also instructed the excur- 
sionists to provide themselves with light musical instruments 
for amusement in the ship; with saddles for Syrian travel; 
green spectacles and umbrellas; veils for Egypt; and substan- 
tial clothing to use in rough pilgrimizing in the Holy Land. 
Furthermore, it was suggested that although the ship's library 
would afford a fair amount of reading matter, it would still be 
well if each passenger would provide himself with a few 
guide-books, a Bible and some standard works of travel. A 
list was appended, which consisted chiefly of books relating to 
the Holy Land, since the Holy Land was part of the excursion 
and seemed to be its main feature. 

Rev. Henry Ward Beecher was to have accompanied the 
expedition, but urgent duties obliged him to give up the idea. 
There were other passengers who could have been spared bet- 
ter, and would have been spared more willingly. Lieut. Gen. 
Sherman was to have been of the party, also, but the Indian 
war compelled his presence on the plains. A popular actress 
had entered her name on the ship's books, but something inter- 
fered, and she couldn't go. The " Drummer Boy of the Poto- 
mac" deserted, and lo, we had never a celebrity left ! 

However, we were to have a " battery of guns " from the 
Navy Department, (as per advertisement,) to be used in 



ENROLLED AMONG THE "SELECT." 25 

answering royal salutes ; and the document furnished by the 
Secretary of the Navy, which was to make " Gen. Sherman 
and party " welcome guests in the courts and camps of the 
old world, was still left to us, though both document and bat- 
tery, I think, were shorn of somewhat of their original august 
proportions. However, had not we the seductive programme, 
still, with its Paris, its Constantinople, Smyrna, Jerusalem, 
Jericho, and " our friends the Bermudians ?" What did vre 
care? 



CHAPTEE II. 

OCCASIONALLY, during the following month, I dropped 
in at 117 Wall-street to inquire how the repairing and 
refurnishing of the vessel was coming on ; how additions to 
the passenger list were averaging ; how many people the com- 
mittee were decreeing not " select," every day, and banishing 
in sorrow and tribulation. I was glad to know that we 
were to have a little printing-press on board and issue a daily 
newspaper of our own. I was glad to learn that our piano, 
our parlor organ and our melodeon were to be the best instru- 
ments of the kind that could be had in the market. I was 
proud to observe that among our excursionists were three min- 
isters of the gospel, eight doctors, sixteen or eighteen ladies, 
several military and naval chieftains with sounding titles, 
an ample crop of " Professors " of various kinds, and a gentle- 
man who had " Commissioner of the United States of America 
to Europe, Asia, and Africa" thundering after his name 
in one awful blast ! I had carefully prepared myself to take 
rather a back seat in that ship, because of the uncommonly 
select material that would alone be permitted to pass through 
the camel's eye of that committee on credentials ; I had 
schooled myself to expect an imposing array of military and 
naval heroes, and to have to set that back seat still further 
back in consequence of it, may be ; but I state frankly that I 
was all unprepared for this crusher. 

I fell under that titular avalanche a torn and blighted thing. 
I said that if that potentate must go over in our ship, why, I 
supposed he must — but that to my thinking, when the United 



AN OFFICIAL COLOSSUS. 27 

States considered it necessary to send a dignitary of that ton- 
nage across the ocean, it would be in better taste, and safer, 
to take him apart and cart him over in sections, in several 
ships. 

Ah, if I had only known, then, that he was only a common 
mortal, and that his mission had nothing more overpowering 
about it than the collecting of seeds, and uncommon yams and 
extraordinary cabbages and peculiar bullfrogs for that poor, 
useless, innocent, mildewed old fossil, the Smithsonian Insti- 
tute, I would have felt so much relieved. 

During that memorable month I basked in the happiness of 
being for once in my life drifting with the tide of a great 
popular movement. Every body was going to Europe — I, too, 
was going to Europe. Every body was going to the famous 
Paris Exposition — I, too, was going to the Paris Exposition. 
The steamship lines were carrying Americans out of the vari- 
ous ports of the country at the rate of four or five thousand a 
week, in the aggregate. If I met a dozen individuals, daring 
that month, who were not going to Europe shortly, I have no 
distinct remembrance of it now. I walked about the city a 
good deal with a young Mr. Blucher, who was booked for the 
excursion. He was confiding, good-natured, unsophisticated, 
companionable ; but he was not a man to set the river on fire. 
He had the most extraordinary notions about this European 
exodus, and came at last to consider the whole nation as pack- 
ing up for emigration to France. We stepped into a store in 
Broadway, one day, where he bought a handkerchief, and when 
the man could not make change, Mr. B. said : 

" Never mind, I'll hand it to you in Paris." 

" But I am not going to Paris." 

"How is — what did I understand you to say?" 

" I said I am not going to Paris." 

" Not going to Paris ! Not g — well then, where in the na- 
tion are you going to V 

" Nowhere at all." 

" Not any where whatsoever ? — not any place on earth but 
this?" 



28 



MR. BLUCHEK'S OPINION 



" Not any place at all but just this — stay here all summer." 

My comrade took his purchase and walked out of the store 

without a word — walked out with an injured look upon his 

countenance. Up the street apiece he broke silence and said 

impressively : " It was a lie — that is my opinion of it !" 




i'll pay you in paris." 



In the fullness of time the ship was ready to receive her pas- 
sengers. I was introduced to the young gentleman who was 
to be my room mate, and found him to be intelligent, cheerful 
of spirit, unselfish, full of generous impulses, patient, consid- 
erate, and wonderfully good-natured. Not any passenger that 
sailed in the Quaker City will withhold his indorsement of 
wnat I have just said. We selected a state-room forward of 



SEA-GOING LODGINGS. 29 

the wheel, on the starboard side, " below decks." It had two 
berths in it, a dismal dead-light, a sink with a wash-bowl in it, 
and a long, sumptuously cushioned locker, which was to do 
service as a sofa — partly, and partly as a hiding-place for our 
things. Notwithstanding all this furniture, there was still 
room to turn around in, but not to swing a cat in, at least with 
entire security to the cat. However, the room was large, for 
a ship's state-room, and was in every way satisfactory. 

The vessel was appointed to sail on a certain Saturday early 
in June. 

A little after noon, on that distinguished Saturday, I reached 
the ship and went on board. All was bustle and confusion. 
[I have seen that remark before, somewhere.] The pier was 
crowded with carriages and men; passengers were arriving 
and hurrying on board ; the vessel's decks were encumbered 
with trunks and valises ; groups of excursionists, arrayed in 
unattractive traveling costumes, were moping about in a driz- 
zling rain and looking as droopy and woe-begone as so many 
Aiolting chickens. The gallant flag was up, but it was under 
the spell, too, and hung limp and disheartened by the mast. 
Altogether, it was the bluest, bluest spectacle ! It was a pleas- 
ure excursion — there was no gainsaying that, because the 
programme said so — it was so nominated in the bond — but it 
surely hadn't the general aspect of one. 

Finally, above the banging, and rumbling, and shouting and 
hissing of steam, rang the order to " cast off!" — a sudden rush 
to the gangways — a scampering ashore of visitors — a revolu- 
tion of the wheels, and we were off — the pic-nic was begun ! 
Two very mild cheers went up from the dripping crowd on the 
pier ; we answered them gently from the slippery decks ; the 
flag made an effort to wave, and failed ; the " battery of guns" 
spake not — the ammunition was out. 

We steamed down to the foot of the harbor and came to an- 
chor. It was still raining. And not only raining, but storming. 
"Outside" we could see, ourselves, that there was a tre- 
mendous sea on. We must lie still, in the calm harbor, till 
the storm should abate. Our passengers hailed from fifteen 



30 



CAST OFF.' 




THE START. 



States ; only a few of them had ever been to sea before ; mani- 
festly it would not do to pit them against a full-blown tempest 
until they had got their sea-legs on. Toward evening the two 
steam-tugs that had accompanied us with a rollicking cham- 
pagne-party of young New Yorkers on board who wished 
to bid farewell to one of our number in due and ancient 
form, departed, and we were alone on the deep. On deep 
five fathoms, and anchored fast to the bottom. And out in 
the solemn rain, at that. This was pleasuring with a ven- 
geance. 

It was an appropriate relief when the gong sounded for 
prayer meeting. The first Saturday night of any other pleas- 
ure excursion might have been devoted to whist and dan- 
cing ; but I submit it to the unprejudiced mind if it would 
have been in good taste for us to engage in such frivolities, 
considering what we had gone through and the frame of mind 



"CAST OFF." 31 

we were in. "We would have shone at a wake, but not at 
any thing more festive. 

However, there is always a cheering influence about the 
sea ; and in my berth, that night, rocked by the measured 
swell of the waves, and lulled by the murmur of the distant 
surf, I soon passed tranquilly out of all consciousness of the 
dreary experiences of the day and damaging premonitions of 
the future. 



OHAPTEE III. 

ALL day Sunday at anchor. The storm had gone down a 
great deal, but the sea had not. It was still piling its 
frothy hills high in air " outside,' 1 as we could plainly see with 
the glasses. We could not properly begin a pleasure excur- 
sion on Sunday; we could not offer untried stomachs to so 
pitiless a sea as that. We must lie still till Monday. And 
we did. But we had repetitions of church and prayer-meet- 
ings ; and so, of course, we were just as eligibly situated as we 
could have been any where. 

I was up early that Sabbath morning, and was early to 
breakfast. I felt a perfectly natural desire to have a good, 
long, unprejudiced look at the passengers, at a time when they 
should be free from self-consciousness — which is at breakfast, 
when such a moment occurs in the lives of human beings at 
all. 

I was greatly surprised to see so many elderly people — I 
might almost say, so many venerable people. A glance at the 
long lines of heads was apt to make one think it was all gray. 
But it was not. There was a tolerably fair sprinkling of 
young folks, and another fair sprinkling of gentlemen and 
ladies who were non-committal as to age, being neither actu- 
ally old or absolutely young. 

The next morning, we weighed anchor and went to sea. It 
was a great happiness to get away, after this dragging, 
dispiriting delay. I thought there never was such gladness in 
the air before, such brightness in the sun, such beauty in the 



UNDER WAY "FOR GOOD." 33 

sea. I was satisfied with the picnic, then, and with all its 
belongings. All my malicious instincts were dead within me ; 
and as America faded out of sight, I think a spirit of charity 
rose up in their place that was as boundless, for the time being, 
as the broad ocean that was heaving its billows about us. I 
wished to express my feelings — I wished to lift up my voice 
and sing ; but I did not know any thing to sing, and so I was 
obliged to give up the idea. It was no loss to the ship though, 
perhaps. 

It was breezy and pleasant, but the sea was still very rough. 
One could not promenade without risking his neck ; at one 
moment the bowsprit was taking a deadly aim at the sun in 
mid-heaven, and at the next it was trying to harpoon a shark 
in the bottom of the ocean. What a weird sensation it is to 
feel the stern of a ship sinking swiftly from under you and see 
the bow climbing high away among the clouds ! One's safest 
course, that day, was to clasp a railing and hang on ; walking 
was too precarious a pastime. 

By some happy fortune I was not seasick. — That was a 
thing to be proud of. I had not always escaped before. If 
there is one thing in the world that will make a man pecu- 
liarly and insufferably self-conceited, it is to have his stomach 
behave itself, the first day at sea, when nearly all his comrades 
are seasick. Soon, a venerable fossil, shawled to the chin and 
bandaged like a mummy, appeared at the door of the after 
deck-house, and the next lurch of the ship shot him into my 
arms. I said : 

" Good-morning, Sir. It is a fine day." 

He put his hand on his stomach and said, " Oh, my!" 
and then staggered away and fell over the coop of a sky- 
light. 

Presently another old gentleman was projected from the 
same door, with great violence. I said : 

" Calm yourself, Sir- — There is no hurry. It is a fine day, 
Sir." 

He, also, put his hand on his stomach and said " Oh, my I" 
and reeled away. 

3 



84: 



TRIBULATION AMONG THE PATRIARCHS 



In a little while another veteran was discharged abruptly 
from the same door, clawing at the air for a saving support. 
I said : 

" Good-morning, Sir. It is a fine day for pleasuring. You 
were about to say — " 




GOOD MORNING, SIR." 



"Oh, my!" 

I thought so. I anticipated him, any how. I staid there 
and was bombarded with old gentlemen for an hour perhaps ; 
and all I got out of any of them was " Oh, my !" 

I went away, then, in a thoughtful mood. I said, this is a 
good pleasure excursion. I like it. The passengers are not 
garrulous, but still they are sociable. I like those old people, 



TRANSGRESSING THE LAWS. 35 

but somehow they all seem to have the " Oh, my " rather 
bad. 

I knew what was the matter with them. They were sea- 
sick. And I was glad of it. We all like to see people sea- 
sick when we are not, ourselves. Playing whist by the cabin 
lamps when it is storming outside, is pleasant ; walking the 
quarter-deck in the moonlight, is pleasant ; smoking in the 
breezy foretop is pleasant, when one is not afraid to go up 
there ; but these are all feeble and commonplace compared with 
the joy of seeing people suffering the miseries of seasickness. 

I picked up a good deal of information during the after- 
noon. At one time I was climbing up the quarter-deck when 
the vessel's stern was in the sky ; I was smoking a cigar and 
feeling passably comfortable. Somebody ejaculated : 

" Come, now, that won't answer. Read the sign up there — 

NO SMOKING ABAFT THE WHEEL !" 

It was Capt. Duncan, chief of the expedition. I went for- 
ward, of course. I saw a long spy-glass lying on a desk in one 
of the upper-deck state-rooms back of the pilot-house, and 
reached after it — there was a ship in the distance : 

" Ah, ah — hands off! Come out of that !" 

I came out of that. I said to a deck-sweep — but in a low 
voice : 

"Who is that overgrown pirate with the whiskers and the 
discordant voice ?" 

" It's Capt. Bursley — executive officer — sailing-master." 

I loitered about awhile, and then, for want of something 
better to do, fell to carving a railing with my knife. Some- 
body said, in an insinuating, admonitory voice : 

"Now say — my friend — don't you know any better than 
to be whittling the ship all to pieces that way ? You ought to 
know better than that." 

I went back and found the deck-sweep : 

" Who is that smooth-faced animated outrage yonder in the 
fine clothes ?" 

"That's Capt. L****, the owner of the ship — he's one of 
the main bosses." 



36 



TRANSGRESSING THE LAWS 



In the course of time I brought up on the starboard side of 
the pilot-house, and found a sextant lying on a bench. Now, 
I said, they " take the sun " through this thing ; I should 
think I might see that vessel through it. I had hardly got it 
to my eye when some one touched me on the shoulder and 
said, deprecatingly : 

" I'll have to get you to give that to me, Sir. If there's any 




THE OLD PIRATE. 



thing you'd like to know about taking the sun, I'd as soon 
tell you as not — but I don't like to trust any body with 
that instrument. If you want any figuring done — Aye- 
aye, Sir!" 

He was gone, to answer a call from the other side. I 
sought the deck-sweep : 

" Who is that spider-legged gorilla yonder with the sancti* 
monious countenance?" 

" It's Capt. Jones, Sir — the chief mate." 



TRANSGRESSING THE LAWS. 37 

" Well. This goes clear away ahead of any thing I ever 
heard of before. Do you — now I ask you as a man and a 
brother — do you think I could venture to throw a rock here 
in any given direction without hitting a captain of this ship ?" 

" Well, Sir, I don't know — I think likely you'd fetch the 
captain of the watch, may be, because he's a-standing right 
yonder in the way." 

I went below — meditating, and a little down-hearted. I 
thought, if five cooks can spoil a broth, what may not five cap- 
tains do with a pleasure excursion. 



CHAPTEE IV. 

~TT7"E plowed along bravely for a week or more, and with- 
V V out any conflict of jurisdiction among the captains 
worth mentioning. The passengers soon learned to accommo- 
date themselves to their new circumstances, and life in the 
ship became nearly as systematically monotonous as the 
routine of a barrack. I do not mean that it was dull, for it 
was not entirely so by any means — but there was a good 
deal of sameness about it. As is always the fashion at sea, the 
passengers shortly began to pick up sailor terms — a sign that 
they were beginning to feel at home. Half-past six was no 
longer half-past six to these pilgrims from New England, the 
South, and the Mississippi Yalley, it was " seven bells ;" eight, 
twelve and four o'clock were " eight bells ;" the captain did 
not take the longitude at nine o'clock, but at " two bells." 
They spoke glibly of the " after cabin," the " for'rard cabin," 
" port and starboard " and the " fo'castle." 

At seven bells the first gong rang ; at eight there was break- 
fast, for such as were not too seasick to eat it. After that all 
the well people walked arm-in-arm up and down the long 
promenade deck, enjoying the fine summer mornings, and the 
seasick ones crawled out and propped themselves up in the 
lee of the paddle-boxes and ate their dismal tea and toast, and 
looked wretched. From eleven o'clock until luncheon, and 
from luncheon until dinner at six in the evening, the employ- 
ments and amusements were various. Some reading was 
done ; and much smoking and sewing, though not by the same 
parties ; there were the monsters of the deep to be looked after 



PILGRIM LIFE AT SEA. 39 

and wondered at ; strange ships had to be scrutinized through 
opera-glasses, and sage decisions arrived at concerning them ; 
and more than that, every body took a personal interest in see- 
ing that the flag was run up and politely dipped three times in 
response to the salutes of those strangers ; in the smoking- 
room there were always parties of gentlemen playing euchre, 
draughts and dominoes, especially dominoes, that delightfully 
harmless game; and down on the main deck, "for'rard" — 
for'rard of the chicken-coops and the cattle — we had what was 
called " horse-billiards." Horse-billiards is a fine game. It 
affords good, active exercise, hilarity, and consuming excitement. 
It is a mixture of " hop-scotch " and shuffle-board played with a 
crutch. A large hop-scotch diagram is marked out on the deck 
with chalk, and each compartment numbered. You stand off 
three or four steps, with some broad wooden disks before you on 
the deck, and these you send forward with a vigorous thrust of 
a long crutch. If a disk stops on a chalk line, it does not count 
any thing. If it stops in division No. 7, it counts 7 ; in 5, it 
counts 5, and so on. The game is 100, and four can play at a 
time. That game would be very simple, played on a sta- 
tionary floor, but with us, to play it well required science. 
We had to allow for the reeling of the ship to the right or the 
left. Yery often one made calculations for a heel to the right 
and the ship did not go that way. The consequence was that 
that disk missed the whole hop-scotch plan a yard or two, and 
then there was humiliation on one side and laughter on the other. 

When it rained, the passengers had to stay in the house, of 
course — or at least the cabins — and amuse themselves with 
games, reading, looking out of the windows at the very famil- 
iar billows, and talking gossip. 

By 7 o'clock in the evening, dinner was about over ; an 
hour's promenade on the upper deck followed ; then the gong 
sounded and a large majority of the party repaired to the after 
cabin (upper) a handsome saloon fifty or sixty feet long, for 
prayers. The unregenerated called this saloon the " Syna- 
gogue." The devotions consisted only of two hymns from 
the "Plymouth Collection,," and a short prayer, and seldom 



40 THE 

occupied more than fifteen minutes. The hymns were accom- 
panied by parlor organ music when the sea was smooth enough 
to allow a performer to sit at the instrument without being 
lashed to his chair. 

After prayers the Synagogue shortly took the semblance of 
a writing-school. The like of that picture was never seen in 
a ship before. Behind the long dining-tables on either side of 
the saloon, and scattered from one end to the other of the latter, 
some twenty or thirty gentlemen and ladies sat them down 
under the swaying lamps, and for two or three hours wrote 
diligently in their journals. Alas ! that journals so volumi- 
nously begun should come to so lame and impotent a conclu- 
sion as most of them did ! I doubt if there is a single pilgrim 
of all that host but can show a hundred fair pages of journal 
concerning the first twenty days' voyaging in the Quaker City ; 
and I am morally certain that not ten of the party can show 
twenty pages of journal for the succeeding twenty thousand 
miles of voyaging ! At certain periods it becomes the dearest 
ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances 
in a book ; and he dashes at this work with an enthusiasm 
that imposes on him the notion that keeping a journal is the 
veriest pastime in the world, and the pleasantest. But if he 
only lives twenty-one days, he will find out that only those 
rare natures that are made up of pluck, endurance, devotion 
to duty for duty's sake, and invincible determination, may hope 
to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of 
a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat. 

One of our favorite youths, Jack, a splendid young fellow 
with a head full of good sense, and a pair of legs that were a 
wonder to look upon in the way of length, and straightness, 
and slimness, used to report progress every morning in the 
most glowing and spirited way, and say : 

" Oh, I'm coming along bully !" (he was a little given to 
slang, in his happier moods,) " I wrote ten pages in my journal 
last night — and you know I wrote nine the night before, and 
twelve the night before that. Why it's only fun !" 

" What do you find to put in it, Jack ?" 



41 

" Oh, every thing. Latitude and longitude, noon. every day ; 
and how many miles we made last twenty-four hours ; and all 
the domino-games I beat, and horse-billiards ; and whales and 
sharks and porpoises ; and the text of the sermon, Sundays ; 
(because that'll tell at home, you know,) and the ships we sa- 
luted and what nation they were ; and which way the wind 
was, and whether there was a heavy sea, and what sail we 
carried, though we don't ever carry any, principally, going 
against a head wind always — wonder what is the reason of. 
that ? — and how many lies Moult has told — Oh, every thing ' 
I've got every thing down. My father told me to keep that 
journal. Father wouldn't take a thousand dollars for it when 
I get it done." 

" "No, Jack ; it will be worth more than a thousand dollars — 
when you get it done." 

" Do you ? — no, but do you think it will, though ?" 

" Yes, it will be worth at least as much as a thousand dol- 
lars — when you get it done. May be, more." 

" Well, I about half think so, myself. It ain't no slouch of a 
journal." 

But it shortly became a most lamentable " slouch of a jour- 
nal." One night in Paris, after a hard day's toil in sight- 
seeing, I said : 

" Now I'll go and stroll around the cafes awhile, Jack, and 
give you a chance to write up your journal, old fellow." 

His countenance lost its fire. He said : 

" Well, no, you needn't mind. I think I won't run that 
journal any more. It is awful tedious. Do you know — I 
reckon I'm as much as four thousand pages behind hand. I 
haven't got any France in it at all. First I thought I'd leave 
France out and start fresh. But that wouldn't do, would it ? 
The governor would say, l Hello, here — didn't see any thing in 
France V That cat wouldn't fight, you know. First I thought 
I'd copy France out of the guide-book, like old Badger in the 
for'rard cabin who's writing a book, but there's more than three 
hundred pages of it. Oh, I don't think a journal's any use- 
do you ? They're only a bother, airCt they ?" 



42 



THE Q. C. CLUB. 



u Yes, a journal that is incomplete isn't of much use, but a 
journal properly kept, is worth a thousand dollars, — when 
you've got it done." 

" A thousand! — well I should think so. /wouldn't finish 
it for a million." 

His experience was only the experience of the majority of 




DANCING UNDER DIFFICULTIES. 



that industrious night-school in the cabin. If you wish to 
inflict a heartless and malignant punishment upon a young 
person, pledge him to keep a journal a year. 

A good many expedients were resorted to to keep the excur- 
sionists amused and satisfied. A club was formed, of all the 
passengers, which met in the writing-school after prayers and 



DANCING UNDER DIFFICULTIES. 43 

read aloud about the countries we were approaching, and dis- 
cussed the information so obtained. 

Several times the photographer of the expedition brought 
out his transparent pictures and gave us a handsome magic 
lantern exhibition. His views were nearly all of foreign 
scenes, but there were one or two home pictures among them. 
He advertised that he would " open his performance in the 
after cabin at ' two bells,' (9, p. m.,) and show the passengers 
where they shall eventually arrive " — which was all very well, 
but by a funny accident the first picture that flamed out upon 
the canvas was a view of Greenwood Cemetery ! 

On several starlight nights we danced on the upper deck, 
under the awnings, and made something of a ball-room display 
of brilliancy by hanging a number of ship's lanterns to the 
stanchions. Our music consisted of the well-mixed strains 
of a melodeon which was a little asthmatic and apt to catch 
its breath where it ought to come out strong ; a clarinet which 
was a little unreliable on the high keys and rather melancholy 
on the low ones ; and a disreputable accordion that had a leak 
somewhere and breathed louder than it squawked — a more ele- 
gant term does not occur to me just now. However, the 
dancing was infinitely worse than the music. When the ship 
rolled to starboard the whole platoon of dancers came charging 
down to starboard with it, and brought up in mass at the rail ; 
and when it rolled to port, they went floundering down to 
port with the same unanimity of sentiment. Waltzers spun 
around precariously for a matter of fifteen seconds and then 
went skurrying down to the rail as if they meant to go over- 
board. The Yirginia reel, as performed on board the Quaker 
City, had more genuine reel about it than any reel I ever saw 
before, and was as full of interest to the spectator as it was 
full of desperate chances and hairbreadth escapes to the partici- 
pant. We gave up dancing, finally. 

We celebrated a lady's birthday anniversary, with toasts, 
speeches, a poem, and so forth. We also had a mock trial. 
No ship ever went to sea that hadn't a mock trial on board. 
The purser was accused of stealing an overcoat from state-room 



44 



THE MOCK TRIAL. 



No. 10. A judge was appointed ; also clerks, a crier of the 
court, constables, sheriffs ; counsel for the State and for the 
defendant ; witnesses were subpoenaed, and a jury empaneled 
after much challenging. The witnesses were stupid, and un- 
reliable and contradictory, as witnesses always are. The 
counsel were eloquent, argumentative and vindictively abusive 
of each other, as was characteristic and proper. The case was 




MOCK TRIAL. 



at last submitted, and duly finished by the judge with an 
absurd decision and a ridiculous sentence. 

The acting of charades was tried, on several evenings, by 
the young gentlemen and ladies, in the cabins, and proved the 
most distinguished success of all the amusement experi- 
ments. 

An attempt was made to organize a debating club, but it 
was a failure. There was no oratorical talent in the ship. 

We all enjoyed ourselves — I think I can safely say that, but 



PILGRIM SOLEMNITY. 45 

it was in a rather quiet way. We very, very seldom played 
the piano ; we played the flute and the clarinet together, and 
made good music, too, what there was of it, but we always 
played the same old tune ; it was a very pretty tune — how well 
I remember it — I wonder when I shall ever get rid of it. We 
never played either the melodeon or the organ, except at devo- 
tions — but I am too fast : young Albert did know part of a 
tune — something about " O Something-Or-Other How Sweet 
it is to Know that he's his What's-his-Name," (I do not re- 
member the exact title of it, but it was very plaintive, and full of 
sentiment ;) Albert played that pretty much all the time, until 
we contracted with him to restrain himself. But nobody ever 
sang by moonlight on the upper deck, and the congregational 
singing at church and prayers was not of a superior order of 
architecture. I put up with it as long as I could, and then joined 
in and tried to improve it, but this encouraged young George 
to join in too, and that made a failure of it ; because George's 
voice was just " turning," and when he was singing a dismal 
sort of base, it was apt to fly off the handle and startle every 
body with a most discordant cackle on the upper notes. George 
didn't know the tunes, either, which was also a drawback to 
his performances. I said : 

" Come, now, George, don't improvise. It looks too egotis- 
tical. It will provoke remark. Just stick to ' Coronation,' 
like the others. It is a good tune — you can't improve it any, 
just off-hand, in this way." 

" Why I'm not trying to improve it — and I am singing like 
the others — just as it is in the notes." 

And he honestly thought he was, too ; and so he had no one 
to blame but himself when his voice caught on the centre occa- 
sionally, and gave him the lockjaw. 

There were those among the unregenerated who attributed 
the unceasing head-winds to our distressing choir-music. There 
were those who said openly that it was taking chances enough 
to have such ghastly music going on, even when it was at its 
best ; and that to exaggerate the crime by letting George help, 
was simply flying in the face of Providence. These said that 



46 GRUMBLERS. 

the choir would keep up their lacerating attempts at melody 
until they would bring down a storm some day that would sink 
the ship. 

There were even grumblers at the prayers. The executive 
officer said the Pilgrims had no charity : 

" There they are, down there every night at eight bells, 
praying for fair winds — when they know as well as I do that 
this is the only ship going east this time of the year, but there's 
a thousand coming west — what's a fair wind for us is a head 
wind to them — the Almighty's blowing a fair wind for a thou- 
sand vessels, and this tribe wants him to turn it clear around 
so as to accommodate one, — and she a steamship at that ! It 
ain't good sense, it ain't good reason, it ain't good Christianity, 
it ain't common human charity. Avast with such nonsense 1" 



OHAPTEB V. 

TAKING it " by and large," as the sailors say, we had a 
pleasant ten days' run from New York to the Azores 
islands — not a fast run, for the distance is only twenty-four 
hundred miles — but a right pleasant one, in the main. True, 
we had head-winds all the time, and several stormy experi- 
ences which sent fifty per cent, of the passengers to bed, sick, 
and made the ship look dismal and deserted — stormy experi- 
ences that all will remember who weathered them on the 
tumbling deck, and caught the vast sheets of spray that 
every now and then sprang high in air from the weather 
bow and swept the ship like a thunder-shower; but for the 
most part we had balmy summer weather, and nights that 
were even finer than the days. "We had the phenomenon 
of a full moon located just in the same spot in the heavens at 
the same hour every night. The reason of this singular con- 
duct on the part of the moon did not occur to us at first, but it 
did afterward when we reflected that we were gaining about 
twenty minutes every day, because we were going east so fast 
— we gained just about enough every day to keep along with 
the moon. It was becoming an old moon to the friends we had 
left behind us, but to us Joshuas it stood still in the same 
place, and remained always the same. 

Young Mr. Blucher, who is from the Far "West, and is on 
his first voyage, was a good deal worried by the constantly 
changing " ship-time." He was proud of his new watch at 
first, and used to drag it out promptly when eight bells struck 
at noon, but he came to look after a while as if he were losing 



48 BLUCHER IN TROUBLE. 

confidence in it. Seven days out from New York he came on 
deck, and said with great decision ; 

" This thing's a swindle !" 

"What's a swindle?" 

" Why, this watch. I bought her out in Illinois — gave $150 
for her — and I thought she was good. And, by George, she is 
good on shore, but somehow she don't keep up her lick here 
on the water — gets seasick, may be. She skips ; she runs along 
regular enough till half-past eleven, and then, all of a sudden, 
she lets down. I've set that old regulator up faster and faster, 
till I've shoved it clear around, but it don't do any good ; she 
just distances every watch in the .ship, and clatters along in a 
way that's astonishing till it is noon, but them eight bells al- 
ways gets in about ten minutes ahead of her any way. I don't 
know what to do with her now. She's doing all she can — 
she's going her best gait, but it won't save her. Now, don't 
you know, there ain't a watch in the ship that's making better 
time than she is : but what does it signify ? When you hear 
them eight bells you'll find her just about ten minutes short of 
her score, sure." 

The ship was gaining a full hour every three days, and this 
fellow was trying to make his watch go fast enough to keep up 
to her. But, as he had said, he had pushed the regulator up 
as far as it would go, and the watch was " on its best gait," 
and so nothing was left him but to fold his hands and see the 
ship beat the race. We sent him to the captain, and he ex- 
plained to him the mystery of " ship-time," and set his troubled 
mind at rest. This young man asked a great many questions 
about seasickness before we left, and wanted to know what its 
characteristics were, and how he was to tell when he had it. 
He found out. 

We saw the usual sharks, blackfish, porpoises, &c, of course, 
and by and by large schools of Portuguese men-of-war were 
added to the regular list of sea wonders. Some of them were 
white and some of a brilliant carmine color. The nautilus is 
nothing but a transparent web of jelly, that spreads itself to 
catch the wind, and has fleshy-looking strings a foot or two 



LAND. 



HO!" 



49 



long dangling from it to keep it steady in the water. It is an 
accomplished sailor, and has good sailor judgment. It reefs its 
sail when a storm threatens or the wind blows pretty hard, and 
furls it entirely and goes down when a gale blows. Ordinarily 
it keeps its sail wet and in good sailing order by turning over 
and dipping it in the water for a moment. Seamen say the 
nautilus is only found in these waters between the 35th and 
45th parallels of latitude. 




LAND, HO!" 



At three o'clock on the morning of the 21st of June, we 
were awakened and notified that the Azores islands were in 
sight. I said I did not take any interest in islands at three 
o'clock in the morning. But another persecutor came, and 
then another and another, and finally believing that the general 
enthusiasm would permit no one to slumber in peace, I got up 
and went sleepily on deck. It was five and a half o'clock now, 
and a raw, blustering morning. The passengers were huddled 
about the smoke-stacks and fortified behind ventilators, and all 
were wrapped in wintry costumes, and looking sleepy and un- 
happy in the pitiless gale and the drenching spray. 



50 "FLOKES. — FAYAL!" 

The island in sight was Flores. It seemed only a mountain 
of mud standing up out of the dull mists of the sea. But as 
we bore down upon it, the sun came out and made it a beau- 
tiful picture — a mass of green farms and meadows that swelled 
up to a height of fifteen hundred feet, and mingled its upper 
outlines with the clouds. It was ribbed with sharp, steep 
ridges, and cloven with narrow canons, and here and there on 
the heights, rocky upheavals shaped themselves into mimic bat- 
tlements and castles ; and out of rifted clouds came broad shafts 
of sunlight, that painted summit, and slope, and glen, with 
bands of fire, and left belts of sombre shade between. It was 
the aurora borealis of the frozen pole exiled to a summer land ! 

We skirted around two-thirds of the island, four miles from 
shore, and all the opera-glasses in the ship were called into 
requisition to settle disputes as to whether mossy spots on the 
uplands were groves of trees or groves of weeds, or whether 
the white villages down by the sea were really villages or only 
the clustering tombstones of cemeteries. Finally, we stood to 
sea and bore away for San Miguel, and Flores shortly became 
a dome of mud again, and sank down among the mists and 
disappeared. But to many a seasick passenger it was good to 
see the green hills again, and all were more cheerful after this 
episode than any body could have expected them to be, con- 
sidering how sinfully early they had gotten up. 

But we had to change our purpose about San Miguel, for a 
storm came up about noon that so tossed and pitched the vessel 
that common sense dictated a run for shelter. Therefore we 
steered for the nearest island of the group — Fayal, (the people 
there pronounce it Fy-all, and put the accent on the first 
syllable.) We anchored in the open roadstead of Horta, half 
a mile from the shore. The town has eight thousand to ten 
thousand inhabitants. Its snow-white houses nestle cosily in a 
sea of fresh green vegetation, and no village could look prettier 
or more attractive. It sits in the lap of an amphitheatre of 
hills which are three hundred to seven hundred feet high, and 
carefully cultivated clear to their summits — not a foot of soil 
left idle. Every farm and every acre is cut up into little square 



"ON SHORE." 51 

inelosures by stone walls, whose duty it is to protect the grow- 
ing products from the destructive gales that blow there. These 
hundreds of green squares, marked by their black lava walls, 
make the hills look like vast checker-boards. 

The islands belong to Portugal, and every thing in Fayal has 
Portuguese characteristics about it. But more of that anon. 
A swarm of swarthy, noisy, lying, shoulder-shrugging, gestic- 
ulating Portuguese boatmen, with brass rings in their ears, and 
fraud in their hearts, climbed the ship's sides, and various par- 
ties of us contracted with them to take us ashore at so much a 
head, silver coin of any country. We landed under the walls 
of a little fort, armed with batteries of twelve and thirty-two 
pounders, which Horta considered a most formidable insti- 
tution, but if we were ever to get after it with one of our tur- 
reted monitors, they would have to move it out in the country 
if they wanted it where they could go and find it again when 
they needed it. The group on the pier was a rusty one — men 
and women, and boys and girls, all ragged, and barefoot, un- 
combed and unclean, and by instinct, education, and profession, 
beggars. They trooped after us, and never more, while we 
tarried in Fayal, did we get rid of them. We walked up the 
middle of the principal street, and these vermin surrounded us 
on all sides, and glared upon us ; and every moment excited 
couples shot ahead of the procession to get a good . look back, 
just as village boys do when they accompany the elephant on 
his advertising trip from street to street. It was very flattering 
to me to be part of the material for such a sensation. Here 
and there in the doorways we saw women, with fashionable 
Portuguese hoods on. This hood is of thick blue cloth, 
attached to a cloak of the same stuff, and is a marvel of ugli- 
ness. It stands up high, and spreads far abroad, and is unfath- 
omably deep. It fits like a circus tent, and a woman's head is 
hidden away in it like the man's who prompts the singers from 
his tin shed in the stage of an opera. There is no particle of 
trimming about this monstrous capote, as they call it — it is just 
a plain, ugly dead-blue mass of sail, and a woman can't go 
within eight points of the wind with one of them on ; she has 



52 



A DISASTROUS BANQUET 




CAPOTE. 



to go before the wind or not at all. The general style of the 
capote is the same in all the islands, and will remain so for the 

next ten thousand years, but each isl- 
and shapes its capotes just enough 
differently from the others to enable 
an observer to tell at a glance what 
particular island a lady hails from. 

The Portuguese pennies or reis (pro- 
nounced rays) are prodigious. It takes 
one thousand reis to make a dollar, 
and all financial estimates are made 
in reis. We did not know this until 
after we had found it out through 
Blucher. Blucher said he was so 
happy and so grateful to be on solid 
land once more, that he wanted to 
give a feast — said he had heard it 
was a cheap land, and he was bound to have a grand ban- 
quet. He invited nine of us, and we ate an excellent dinner 
at the principal hotel. In the midst of the jollity produced 
by good cigars, good wine, and passable anecdotes, the landlord 
presented his bill. Blucher glanced at it and his countenance 
fell. He took another look to assure himself that his senses 
had not deceived him, and then read the items aloud, in a fal- 
tering voice, while the roses in his cheeks turned to ashes : 

" ' Ten dinners, at 600 reis, 6,000 reis !' Euin and deso- 
lation !" 

" ' Twenty-five cigars, at 100 reis, 2,500 reis V Oh, my 
sainted mother !" 

" ' Eleven bottles of wine, at 1,200 reis, 13,200 reis !' Be 
with us all !" 

" * Total, twenty-one thousand seven hundred reis V 
The suffering Moses ! — there ain't money enough in the ship 
to pay that bill ! Go — leave me to my misery, boys, I am a 
ruined community." 

I think it was the blankest looking party I ever saw. No 
body could say a word. It was as if every soul had been 



A DISASTROUS BANQUET. 



53 



stricken dumb. "Wine-glasses descended slowly to the table, 
their contents untasted. Cigars dropped unnoticed from nerve- 
less fingers. Each man sought his neighbor's eye, but found 
in it no ray of hope, no encouragement. At last the fearful 
silence was broken. The shadow of a desperate resolve settled 




"RUIN AND DESOLATION!" 

upon Blucher's countenance like a cloud, and he rose up and 



"Landlord, this is a low, mean swindle, .and I'll never, 
never stand it. Here's a hundred and fifty dollars, Sir, and 
it's all you'll get — I'll swim in blood, before I'll pay a cent 



more. 



Our spirits rose and the landlord's fell — at least we thought 
so ; he was confused at any rate, notwithstanding he had not 
understood a word that had been said. He glanced from the 



54 THE HAPPY RESULT. 

little pile of gold pieces to Blucher several times, and then 
Went out. He must have visited an American, for, when he 
returned, he brought back his bill translated into a language 
that a Christian could understand — thus : 



10 dinners, 6,000 reis, or $6.00 

25 cigars, 2,500 reis, or „ 2.50 

11 bottles wine, 13,200 reis, or 13.20 

Total 21,700 reis, or $21.70 

Happiness reigned once more in Blucher's dinner party. 
More refreshments were ordered. 



CHAPTER VI. 

ITHIKK the Azores must be very little known in America. 
Out of our whole ship's company there was not a solitary 
individual who knew any thing whatever about them. Some 
of the party, well read concerning most other lands, had no 
other information about the Azores than that they were a group 
of nine or ten small islands far out in the Atlantic, something 
more than half way between ISTew York and Gibraltar. That 
was all. These considerations move me to put in a paragraph 
of dry facts just here. 

The community is eminently Portuguese — that is to say, it 
is slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy. There is a civil gov- 
ernor, appointed by the King of Portugal ; and also a military 
governor, who can assume supreme control and suspend the 
civil government at his pleasure. The islands contain a popu- 
lation of about 200,000, almost entirely Portuguese. Every 
thing is staid and settled, for the country was one hundred 
years old when Columbus discovered America. The principal 
crop is corn, and they raise it and grind it just as their great- 
great-great-grandfathers did. They plow with a board slightly 
shod with iron ; their trifling little harrows are drawn by men 
and women; small windmills grind the corn, ten bushels a 
day, and there is one assistant superintendent to feed the mill 
and a general superintendent to stand by and keep him from 
going to sleep. When the wind changes they hitch on some 
donkeys, and actually turn the whole upper half of the mill 
around until the sails are in proper position, instead of fixing 
the concern so that the sails could be moved instead of the 



56 A CURIOUS PEOPLE. 

mill. Oxen tread the wheat from the ear, after the fashion 
prevalent in the time of Methuselah. There is not a wheel- 
barrow in the land — they carry every thing on their heads, or 
on donkeys, or in a wicker-bodied cart, whose wheels are solid 
blocks of wood and whose axles turn with the wheel. There 
is not a modern plow in the islands, or a threshing-machine. 
All attempts to introduce them have failed. The good Cath- 
olic Portuguese crossed himself and prayed God to shield him 
from all blasphemous desire to know more than his father did 
before him. The climate is mild ; they never have snow or 
ice, and I saw no chimneys in the town. The donkeys and 
the men, women and children of a family, all eat and sleep in 
the same room, and are unclean, are ravaged by vermin, and 
are truly happy. The people lie, and cheat the stranger, and 
are desperately ignorant, and have hardly any reverence for 
their dead. The latter trait shows how little better they are 
than the donkeys they eat and sleep with. The only well- 
dressed Portuguese in the camp are the half a dozen well-to-do 
families, the Jesuit priests and the soldiers of the little garri- 
son. The wages of a laborer are twenty to twenty-four cents 
a day, and those of a good mechanic about twice as much. 
They count it in reis at a thousand to the dollar, and this 
makes them rich and contented. Fine grapes used to grow in 
the islands, and an excellent wine was made and exported. 
But a disease killed all the vines fifteen years ago, and since 
that time no wine has been made. The islands being wholly 
of volcanic origin, the soil is necessarily very rich. Nearly 
every foot of ground is under cultivation, and two or three 
crops a year of each article are produced, but nothing is 
exported save a few oranges — chiefly to England. Nobody 
comes here, and nobody goes away. News is a thing unknown 
in Fayal. A thirst for it is a passion equally unknown. A 
Portuguese of average intelligence inquired if our civil war 
was over ? because, he said, somebody had told him it was — or 
at least it ran in his mind that somebody had told him some- 
thing like that ! And when a passenger gave an officer of the 
garrison copies of the Tribune, the Herald, and Times, he was 




ifjll 



THE CATHEDRAL. 57 

surprised to find later news in them from Lisbon than he had 
just received by the little monthly steamer. He was told that 
it came by cable. He said he knew they had tried to lay a 
cable ten years ago, but it had been in his mind, somehow, 
that they hadn't succeeded ! 

It is in communities like this that Jesuit humbuggery flour- 
ishes. We visited a Jesuit cathedral nearly two hundred 
years old, and found in it a piece of the veritable cross upon 
which our Saviour was crucified. It was polished and hard, 
and in as excellent a state of preservation as if the dread 
tragedy on Calvary had occurred yesterday instead of eighteen 
centuries ago. But these confiding people believe in that 
piece of wood unhesitatingly. 

In a chapel of the cathedral is an altar with facings of solid 
silver — at least they call it so, and I think myself it would go 
a couple of hundred to the ton (to speak after the fashion of 
the silver miners,) and before it is kept forever burning a 
small lamp. A devout lady who died, left money and con- 
tracted for unlimited masses for the repose of her soul, and 
also stipulated that this lamp should be kept lighted always, 
day and night. She did all this before she died, you under- 
stand. It is a very small lamp, and a very dim one, and it 
could not work her much damage, I think, if it went out 
altogether. 

The great altar of the cathedral, and also three or four 
minor ones, are a perfect mass of gilt gimcracks and ginger- 
bread. And they have a swarm of rusty, dusty, battered 
apostles standing around the filagree work, some on one leg and 
some with one eye out but a gamey look in the other, and 
some with two or three fingers gone, and some with not 
enough nose left to blow — all of them crippled and discour- 
aged, and fitter subjects for the hospital than the cathedral. 

The walls of the chancel are of porcelain, all pictured over 
with figures of almost life size, very elegantly wrought, and 
dressed in the fanciful costumes of two centuries ago. The 
design was a hktory of something or somebody, but none of 
us were learned enough to read the story. The old father, 



58 FANTASTIC PILGRIMIZING. 

reposing under a stone close by, dated 1686, might have told 
us if he could have risen. But he didn't. 

As we came down through the town, we encountered a 
squad of little donkeys ready saddled for use. The saddles 
were peculiar, to say the least. They consisted of a sort of 
saw-buck, with a small mattress on it, and this furniture cov- 
ered about half the donkey. There were no stirrups, but 
really such supports were not needed — to use such a saddle 
was the next thing to riding a dinner table — there was ample 
support clear out to one's knee joints. A pack of ragged Por- 
tuguese muleteers crowded around us, offering their beasts at 
half a dollar an hour — more rascality to the stranger, for the 
market price is sixteen cents. Half a dozen of us mounted 
the ungainly affairs, and submitted to the indignity of making 
a ridiculous spectacle of ourselves through the principal streets 
of a town of 10,000 inhabitants. 

We started. It was not a trot, a gallop, or a canter, but a 
stampede, and made up of all possible or conceivable gaits. 
~No spurs were necessary. There was a muleteer to every 
donkey and a dozen volunteers beside, and they banged the 
donkeys with their goad-sticks, and pricked them with their 
spikes, and shouted something that sounded like " Sekki-yah /" 
and kept up a din and a racket that was worse than Bedlam 
itself. These rascals were all on foot, but no matter, they 
were always up to time — they can outrun and outlast a 
donkey. Altogether ours was a lively and a picturesque pro- 
cession, and drew crowded audiences to the balconies wherever 
we went. 

Blucher could do nothing at all with his donkey. The beast 
scampered zigzag across the road and the others ran into him ; 
he scraped Blucher against carts and the corners of houses ; the 
road was fenced in with high stone walls, and the donkey gave 
him a polishing first on one side and then on the other, but 
never once took the middle ; he finally came to the house he 
was born in and darted into the parlor, scraping Blucher off 
at the doorway. After remounting, Blucher said to the 
muleteer, " Now, that's enough, you know ; you go slow here- 



THE CATASTROPHE. 



59 



after." But the fellow knew no English and did not under- 
stand, so he simply said, " Sekki-yah ! " and the donkey was 
off again like a shot. He turned a corner suddenly, and 
Blucher went over his head. And, to speak truly, every mule 
stumbled over the two, and the whole cavalcade was piled up 




kki-yah!" 



in a heap. ISTo harm done. A fall from one of those donkeys 
is of little more consequence than rolling off a sofa. The 
donkeys all stood still after the catastrophe, and waited for 
their dismembered saddles to be patched up and put on by the 
noisy muleteers. Blucher was pretty angry, and wanted to 
swear, but every time he opened his mouth his animal did so 



60 ORIGIN OF THE RUSS PAVEMENT. 

also, and let off a series of brays that drowned all other 
sounds. 

It was fun, skurrying around the breezy hills and through 
the beautiful canons. There was that rare thing, novelty, 
about it ; it was a fresh, new, exhilarating sensation, this 
donkey riding, and worth a hundred worn and threadbare 
home pleasures. 

The roads were a wonder, and well they might be. Here 
was an island with only a handful of people in it — 25,000 — - 
and yet such fine roads do not exist in the United States out- 
side of Central Park. Every where you go, in any direction, 
you find either a hard, smooth,- level thoroughfare, just 
sprinkled with black lava sand, and bordered with little gutters 
neatly paved with small smooth pebbles, or compactly paved 
ones like Broadway. They talk much of the Russ pavement 
in New York, and call it a new invention — yet here they 
have been using it in this remote little isle of the sea for two 
hundred years ! Every street in Horta is handsomely paved 
with the heavy Russ blocks, and the surface is neat and true 
as a floor — not marred by holes like Broadway. And every 
road is fenced in by tall, solid lava walls, which will last a 
thousand years in this land where frost is unknown. They are 
very thick, and are often plastered and whitewashed, and 
capped with projecting slabs of cut stone. Trees from gardens 
above hang their swaying tendrils down, and contrast their 
bright green with the whitewash or the black lava of the 
walls, and make them beautiful. The trees and vines stretch 
across these narrow roadways sometimes, and so shut out the 
sun that you seem to be riding through a tunnel. The pave- 
ments, the roads, and the bridges are all government work. 

The bridges are of a single span — a single arch — of cut 
stone, without a support, and paved on top with flags of lava 
and ornamental pebble work. Every where are walls, walls, 
walls, — and all of them tasteful and handsome — and eter- 
nally substantial ; and every where are those marvelous pave- 
ments, so neat, so smooth, and so indestructible. And if ever 
roads and streets, and the outsides of houses, were perfectly 



SQUAKING ACCOUNTS. 61 

free from any sign or semblance of dirt, or dust, or mud, or 
uncleanliness of any kind, it is Horta, it is Fayal. The lower 
classes of the people, in their persons and their domicils, are 
not clean — but there it stops — the town and the island are 
miracles of cleanliness. 

We arrived home again finally, after a ten-mile excursion, 
and the irrepressible muleteers scampered at our heels through 
the main street, goading the donkeys, shouting the everlasting 
" Sekki-yah" and singing " John Brown's Body " in ruinous 
English. 

When we were dismounted and it came to settling, the 
shouting and jawing, and swearing and quarreling among the 
muleteers and with us, was nearly deafening. One fellow 
would demand a dollar an hour for the use of his donkey ; 
another claimed half a dollar for pricking him up, another a 
quarter for helping in that service, and about fourteen guides 
presented bills for showing us the way through the town and 
its environs ; and every vagrant of them was more vociferous, 
and more vehement, and more frantic in gesture than his 
neighbor. We paid one guide, and paid for one muleteer to 
each donkey. 

The mountains on some of the islands are very high. We 
sailed along the shore of the Island of Pico, under a stately 
green pyramid that rose up with one unbroken sweep from our 
very feet to an altitude of 7,613 feet, and thrust its summit 
above the white clouds like an island adrift in a fog ! 

We got plenty of fresh oranges, lemons, figs, apricots, etc. 
in these Azores, of course. But I will desist. I am not here 
to write Patent-Office reports. 

We are on our way to Gibraltar, and shall reach there five 
or six days out from the Azores. 



CHAPTER VII. 

A WEEK of buffeting a tempestuous and relentless sea; a 
week of seasickness and deserted cabins; of lonely 
quarter-decks drenched with spray — spray so ambitious that it 
even coated the smoke-stacks thick with a white crust of salt 
to their very tops ; a week of shivering in the shelter of the 
life-boats and deck-houses by day, and blowing suffocating 
"clouds" and boisterously performing at dominoes in the 
smoking room at night. 

And the last night of the seven was the stormiest of all. 
There was no thunder, no noise but the pounding bows of the 
ship, the keen whistling of the gale through the cordage, and 
the rush of the seething waters. But the vessel climbed aloft 
as if she would climb to heaven — then paused an instant that 
seemed a century, and plunged headlong down again, as from 
a precipice. The sheeted sprays drenched the decks like rain. 
The blackness of darkness was every where. At long inter- 
vals a flash of lightning clove it with a quivering line of fire, 
that revealed a heaving world of water where was nothing 
before, kindled the dusky cordage to glittering silver, and lit 
up the faces of the men with a ghastly lustre ! 

Fear drove many on deck that were used to avoiding the 
night- winds and the spray. Some thought the vessel could not 
live through the night, and it seemed less dreadful to stand 
out in the midst of the wild tempest and see the peril that 
threatened than to be shut up in the sepulchral cabins, under 
the dim lamps and imagine the horrors that were abroad on 
the ocean. And once out — once where they could see the 



SPAIN AND AFRICA ON EXHIBITION. 63 

ship struggling in the strong grasp of the storm — once where 
they could hear the shriek of the winds, and face the driving 
spray and look out upon the majestic picture the lightnings 
disclosed, they were prisoners to a fierce fascination they could 
not resist, and so remained. It was a wild night — and a very, 
very long one. 

Every body was sent scampering to the deck at seven o'clock 
this lovely morning of the 30th of June with the glad news 
that land was in sight ! It was a rare thing and a joyful, to 
see all the ship's family abroad once more, albeit the happiness 
that sat upon every countenance could only partly conceal the 
ravages which that long siege of storms had wrought there. 
But dull eyes soon sparkled with pleasure, pallid cheeks flushed 
again, and frames weakened by sickness gathered new life 
from the quickening influences of the bright, fresh morning. 
Yea, and from a still more potent influence : the worn casta- 
ways were to see the blessed land again ! — and to see it was to 
bring back that mother-land that was in all their thoughts. 

Within the hour we were fairly within the Straits of Gib- 
raltar, the tall yellow-splotched hills of Africa on our right, 
with their bases veiled in a blue haze and their summits 
swathed in clouds — the same being according to Scripture, 
which says that " clouds and darkness are over the land." The 
words were spoken of this particular portion of Africa, I be- 
lieve. On our left were the granite-ribbed domes of old Spain. 
The Strait is only thirteen miles wide in its narrowest part. 

At short intervals, along the Spanish shore, were quaint- 
looking old stone towers — Moorish, we thought — but learned 
better afterwards. In former times the Morocco rascals used 
to coast along the Spanish Main in their boats till a safe oppor- 
tunity seemed to present itself, and then dart in and capture a 
Spanish village, and carry off all the pretty women they could 
find. It was a pleasant business, and was very popular. The 
Spaniards built these watchtowers on the hills to enable them 
to keep a sharper lookout on the Moroccan speculators. 

The picture on the other hand was very beautiful to eyes 
weary of the changeless sea, and bye and bye the ship's com- 



64 



GREETING A MAJESTIC STRANGER 



pany grew wonderfully cheerful. But while we stood admir- 
ing the cloud-capped peaks and the lowlands robed in misty 
gloom, a finer picture burst upon us and chained every eye 
like a magnet — a stately ship, with canvas piled on canvas till 

she was one towering mass 
of bellying sail! She came 
speeding over the sea like a 
great bird. Africa and Spain 
were forgotten. All homage 
was for the beautiful stranger. 
While every body gazed, she 
swept superbly by and flung 
the Stars and Stripes to the 
breeze! Quicker than thought, 
hats and handkerchiefs flashed 
in the air, and a cheer went 
up ! She was beautiful be- 
fore — she was radiant now. 
Many a one on our decks 
knew then for the first time 
how tame a sight his coun- 
try's flag is at home compared 
to what it is in a foreign land. 
To see it is to see a vision 
and feel a thrill that would stir 




BEAUTIFUL STRANGER. 



of home itself and all its idols y 
a very river of sluggish blood ! 

We were approaching the famed Pillars of Hercules, and 
already the African one, "Ape's Hill," a grand old mountain 
with summit streaked with granite ledges, was in sight. The 
other, the great Rock of Gibraltar, was yet to come. The 
ancients considered the Pillars of Hercules the head of navi- 
gation and the end of the world. The information the 
ancients didn't have was very voluminous. Even the prophets 
wrote book after book and epistle after epistle, yet never once 
hinted at the existence of a great continent on our side of the 
water ; yet they must have known it was there, I should think. 

In a few moments a lonely and enormous mass of rock, 



d 



' " • ;■ : 



"I 

1,4 

I 




• :|»W1 



THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR. 65 

standing seemingly in the centre of the wide strait and appar- 
ently washed on all sides by the sea, swung magnificently into 
view, and we needed no tedious traveled parrot to tell us it 
was Gibraltar. There could not be two rocks like that in one 
kingdom. 

The Rock of Gibraltar is about a mile and a half long, I 
should say, by 1,400 to 1,500 feet high, and a quarter of a 
mile wide at its base. One side and one end of it come about 
as straight up out of the sea as the side of a house, the other 
end is irregular and the other side is a steep slant which an 
army would find very difficult to climb. At the foot of this 
slant is the walled town of Gibraltar — or rather the town 
occupies part of the slant. Every where — on hillside, in the 
precipice, by the sea, on the heights, — every where you choose 
to look, Gibraltar is clad with masonry and bristling with 
guns. It makes a striking and lively picture, from whatsoever 
point you contemplate it. It is pushed out into the sea on 
the end of a flat, narrow strip of land, and is suggestive 
of a " gob " of mud on the end of a shingle. A few hundred 
yards of this flat ground at its base belongs to the English, 
and then, extending across the strip from the Atlantic to the 
Mediterranean, a distance of a quarter of a mile, comes the 
" Neutral Ground," a space two or three hundred yards wide, 
which is free to both parties. 

"Are you going through Spain to Paris?" That question 
was bandied about the ship day and night from Fayal to 
Gibraltar, and I thought I never could get so tired of hearing 
any one combination of words again, or more tired of answer- 
ing, " I don't know." At the last moment six or seven had 
sufficient decision of character to make up their minds to go, 
and did go, and I felt a sense of relief at once — it was forever 
too late, now, and I could make up my mind at my leisure, 
not to go. I must have a prodigious quantity of mind ; it 
takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up. 

But behold how annoyances repeat themselves. We had no 
sooner gotten rid of the Spain distress than the Gibraltar 
guides started another — a tiresome repetition of a legend that 

5 



66 TIRESOME REPETITION. 

had nothing very astonishing about it, even in the first place : 
" That high hill yonder is called the Queen's Chair ; it is 
because one of the Queens of Spain placed her chair there 
when the French and Spanish troops were besieging Gibraltar, 
and said she would never move from the spot till the English 
flag was lowered from the fortresses. If the English hadn't 
been gallant enough to lower the flag for a few hours one day, 
she'd have had to break her oath or die up there." 

We rode on asses and mules up the steep, narrow streets 
and entered the subterranean galleries the English have blasted 
out in the rock. These galleries are like spacious railway 
tunnels, and at short intervals in them great guns frown out 
upon sea and town through port-holes Hve or six hundred feet 
above the ocean. There is a mile or so of this subterranean 
work, and it must have cost a vast deal of money and labor. 
The gallery guns command the peninsula and the harbors of 
both oceans, but they might as well not be there, I should 
think, for an army could hardly climb the perpendicular wall 
of the rock any how. Those lofty port-holes afford superb 
views of the sea, though. At one place, where a jutting crag 
was hollowed out into a great chamber whose furniture was 
huge cannon and whose windows were port-holes, a glimpse 
was caught of a hill not far away, and a soldier said : 

" That high hill yonder is called the Queen's Chair ; it is 
because a queen of Spain placed her chair there, once, when 
the French and Spanish troops were besieging Gibraltar, and 
said she would never move from the spot till the English 
flag was lowered from the fortresses. If the English hadn't 
been gallant enough to lower the flag for a few hours, one day, 
she'd have had to break her oath or die up there." 

On the topmost pinnacle of Gibraltar we halted a good 
while, and no doubt the mules were tired. They had a right 
to be. The military road was good, but rather steep, and 
there was a good deal of it. The view from the narrow ledge 
was magnificent ; from it vessels seeming like the tiniest little 
toy-boats, were turned into noble ships by the telescopes ; and 
other vessels that were fifty miles away, and even sixty, they 



THE QUEEN'S CHAIR. 



67 



said, and invisible to the naked eye, could be clearly distin- 
guished through those same telescopes. Below, on one side, 
we looked down upon an endless mass of batteries, and on the 
other straight down to the sea. 

While I was resting ever so comfortably on a rampart, and 
cooling my baking head in the delicious breeze, an officious 
guide belonging to another party came up and said : 

" Senor, that high hill yonder is called the Queen's Chair " — 




" Sir, I am a helpless orphan 
in a foreign land. Have pity 
on me. Don't — now donH inflict 
that most in-FERNAL old legend on me any more to-day !" 

There — I had used strong language, after promising I would 
never do so again ; but the provocation was more than human 
nature could bear. If you had been bored so, when you had 
the noble panorama of Spain and Africa and the blue Medi- 



68 CUKIOSITIES OF THE SECRET CAVERNS. 

terranean, spread abroad at your feet, and wanted to gaze, 
and enjoy, and surfeit yourself with its beauty in silence, 
you might have even burst into stronger language than I 
did. 

Gibraltar has stood several protracted sieges, one of them 
of nearly four years duration (it failed,) and the English only 
captured it by stratagem. The wonder is that any body should 
ever dream of trying so impossible a project as the taking it 
by assault — and yet it has been tried more than once. 

The Moors held the place twelve hundred years ago, and a 
stanch old castle of theirs of that date still frowns from the 
middle of the town, with moss-grown battlements and sides 
well scarred by shots fired in battles and sieges that are for- 
gotten now. A secret chamber, in the rock behind it, was 
discovered some time ago, which contained a sword of ex- 
quisite workmanship, and some quaint old armor of a fashion 
that antiquaries are not acquainted with, though it is supposed 
to be Koman. Eoman armor and Eoman relics, of various 
kinds, have been found in a cave in the sea extremity of Gib- 
raltar ; history says Borne held this part of the country about 
the Christian era, and these things seem to confirm the state- 
ment. 

In that cave, also, are found human bones, crusted with a 
very thick, stony coating, and wise men have ventured to say 
that those men not only lived before the flood, but as much 
as ten thousand years before it. It may be true — it looks 
reasonable enough — but as long as those parties can't vote any 
more, the matter can be of no great public interest. In this 
cave, likewise, are found skeletons and fossils of animals that 
exist in every part of Africa, yet within memory and tradition 
have never existed in any portion of Spain save this lone peak 
of Gibraltar ! So the theory is that the channel between Gib- 
raltar and Africa was once dry land, and that the low, neutral 
neck between Gibraltar and the Spanish hills behind it was 
once ocean, and of course that these African animals, being 
over at Gibraltar (after rock, perhaps — there is plenty there,) 
got closed out when the great change occurred. The hills in 



ECCENTKIC SHIPMATES. 69 

Africa, across the channel, are full of apes, and there are 
now, and always have been, apes on the rock of Gibraltar 
— but not elsewhere in Spain ! The subject is an interesting 
one. 

There is an English garrison at Gibraltar of 6,000 or 7,000 
men, and so uniforms of naming red are plenty ; and red and 
blue, and undress costumes of snowy white, and also the queer 
uniform of the bare-kneed Highlander ; and one sees soft-eyed 
Spanish girls from San Koque, and veiled Moorish beauties (I 
suppose they are beauties) from Tarifa, and turbaned, sashed 
and trowsered Moorish merchants from Fez, and long-robed y 
bare-legged, ragged Mohammedan vagabonds from Tetouan 
and Tangier, some brown, some yellow and some as black as 
virgin ink — and Jews from all around, in gaberdine, skull-cap 
and slippers, just as they are in pictures and theatres, and just 
as they were three thousand years ago, no doubt. You can 
easily understand that a tribe (somehow our pilgrims suggest 
that expression, because they march in a straggling procession 
through these foreign places with such an Indian-like air of 
complacency and independence about them,) like ours, made 
up from fifteen or sixteen States of the Union, found enough 
to stare at in this shifting panorama of fashion to-day. 

Speaking of our pilgrims reminds me that we have one or 
two people among us who are sometimes an annoyance. 
However, I do not count the Oracle in that list. I will explain 
that the Oracle is an nnocent old ass who eats for four and 
looks wiser than the whole Academy of France would have 
any right to look, and never uses a one-syllable word when he 
can think of a longer one, and never by any possible chance 
knows the meaning of any long word he uses, or ever gets it 
in the right place : yet he will serenely venture an opinion on 
the most abstruse subject, and back it up complacently with 
quotations from authors who never existed, and finally when 
cornered will slide to the other side of the question, say he has 
been there all the time, and come back at you with your own 
spoken arguments, only with the big words all tangled, and 
play them in your very teeth as original with himself. He 



70 



ECCENTRIC SHIPMATES 



reads a chapter in the guide-books, mixes the facts all up, 
with his bad memory, and then goes off to inflict the whole 
mess on somebody as wisdom which has been festering in his 
brain for years, and which he gathered in college from erudite 
authors who are dead, now, and out of print. This morning 
at breakfast he pointed out of the window, and said : 

" Do you see that there hill out there on that African coast % 
— It's one of them Pillows of Herkewls, I should say — and 
there's the ultimate one alongside of it." 

" The ultimate one — that is a good word — but the Pillars 
are not both on the same side of the strait." (I saw he had 
been deceived by a carelessly written sentence in the Guide 
Book.) 

" Well, it ain't for you to say, nor for me. Some authors 

states it that 
way, and some 
states it differ- 
ent. Old Gib- 
bons don't say 
nothing about it, 
— just shirks it 
complete — Gib- 
bons always 
done that when 
he got stuck — 
but there is Ro- 
lampton, what 
does he say ? 
Why, he says 
that they was both on the same side, and Trinculian, and 
Sobaster, and Syraccus, and Langomarganbl — " 

" Oh, that wiil do— that's enough. If you have got your 
hand in for inventing authors and testimony, I have nothing 
more to say — let them he on the same side." 

We don't mind the Oracle. We rather like him. We can 
tolerate the Oracle very easily ; but we have a poet and a 
good-natured enterprising idiot on board, and they do distress 




THE ORACLE. 



ECCENTRIC SHIPMATES. 71 

the company. The one gives copies of his verses to Consuls, 
commanders, hotel keepers, Arabs, Dutch, — to any body, in 
fact, who will submit to a grievous infliction most kindly 
meant. His poetry is all very well on shipboard, notwith- 
standing when he wrote an " Ode to the Ocean in a Storm " 
in one half-hour, and an " Apostrophe to the Rooster in the 
Waist of the Ship " in the next, the transition was considered 
to be rather abrupt ; but when he sends an invoice of rhymes 
to the Governor of Fayal and another to the commander-in- 
chief and other dignitaries in Gibraltar, with the compliments 
of the Laureate of the Ship, it is not popular with the passengers. 

The other personage I have mentioned is young and green, 
and not bright, not learned and not wise. He will be, though, 
some day, if he recollects the answers 
to all his questions. He is known 
about the ship as the " Interrogation 
Point," and this by constant use has 
become shortened to " Interrogation." 
He has distinguished himself twice al- 
ready. In Fayal they pointed out a 
hill and told him it was eight hun- 
dred feet high and eleven hundred 
feet long. And they told him there 
was a tunnel two thousand feet long 
and one thousand feet high running "^hrogItion point." 

through the hill, from end to end. 

He believed it. He repeated it to every body, discussed it, 
and read it from his notes. Finally, he took a useful hint from 
this remark which a thoughtful old pilgrim made : 

" Well, yes, it is a little remarkable — singular tunnel alto- 
gether — stands up out of the top of the hill about two hundred 
feet, and one end of it sticks out of the hill about nine hundred !" 

Here in Gibraltar he corners these educated British officers 
and badgers them with braggadocio about America and the 
wonders she can perform. He told one of them a couple of 
our gunboats could come here and knock Gibraltar into the 
Mediterranean Sea! 




)s 



72 



A PRIVATE FROLIC IN AFRICA. 



At this present moment, half a dozen of us are taking a 
private pleasure excursion of our own devising. We form 
rather more than half the list of white passengers on board a 
small steamer bound for the venerable Moorish town of Tan- 
gier, Africa. Nothing could be more absolutety certain 
than that we are enjoying ourselves. One can not do other- 
wise who speeds over these sparkling waters, and breathes the 
soft atmosphere of this sunny land. Care can not assail us 
here. We are out of its jurisdiction. 

We even steamed recklessly by the frowning fortress of 
Malabat, (a stronghold of the Emperor of Morocco,) without a 




twinge of fear. The whole garrison 

turned out under arms, and assumed I 

a threatening attitude — yet still we 

did not fear. The entire garrison marched 



marched, within the rampart, in full view- 
ing even this, we never flinched. 



and counter* 
yet notwithstand* 



BEARDING THE MOOR IN HIS CASTLE. 73 

I suppose we really do not know what fear is. I inquired 
the name of the garrison of the fortress of Malabat, and they 
said it was Meheniet Ali Ben Sancom. I said it would be a 
good idea to get some more garrisons to help him; but 
they said no ; he had nothing to do but hold the place, and 
he was competent to do that ; had done it two years already. 
That was evidence which one could not well refute. There is 
nothing like reputation. 

Every now and then, my glove purchase in Gibraltar last 
night intrudes itself upon me. Dan and the ship's surgeon 
and I had been up to the great square, listening to the music 
of the fine military bands, and contemplating English and 
Spanish female loveliness and fashion, and, at 9 o'clock, were 
on our way to the theatre, when we met the General, the 
Judge, the Commodore, the Colonel, and the Commissioner of 
the United States of America to Europe, Asia, and Africa, 
who had been to the Club House, to register their several 
titles and impoverish the bill of fare ; and they told us to go 
over to the little variety store, near the Hall of Justice, and 
buy some kid gloves. They said they were elegant, and very 
moderate in price. It seemed a stylish thing to go to the 
theatre in kid gloves, and we acted upon the hint. A very 
handsome young lady in the store offered me a pair of blue 
gloves. I did not want blue, but she said they would look 
very pretty on a hand like mine. The remark touched me 
tenderly. I glanced furtively at my hand, and somehow it 
did seem rather a comely member. I tried a glove on my 
left, and blushed a little. Manifestly the size was too small 
for me. But I felt gratified when she said : 

" Oh, it is just right!" — yet I knew it was no such thing. 

I tugged at it diligently, but it was discouraging work. 
She said : 

" Ah ! I see you are accustomed to wearing kid gloves — but 
some gentlemen are so awkward about putting them on." 

It was the last compliment I had expected. I only under- 
stand putting on the buckskin article perfectly. I made 
another effort^ and tore the glove from the base of the thumb 



74 



VANITY REBUKED. 



into the palm of the hand — and tried to hide the rent. She 
kept up her compliments, and I kept up mj determination to 
deserve them or die : 

"Ah, you have had experience!" [A rip down the back 
of the hand.] " They are just right for you — your hand is 

very small — if they 
tear you need not 
pay for them." [A 
rent across the 
middle.] " I can 
always tell when a 
gentleman under- 
stands putting on 
kid gloves. There 
is a grace about it 
that only comes 
with long practice. 
[The whole after- 
guard of the glove 
" fetched away," as 
the sailors say, the 
fabric parted across the knuckles, and nothing was left but a 
melancholy ruin.] 

I was too much flattered to make an exposure, and throw 
the merchandise on the angel's hands. I was hot, vexed, con- 
fused, but still happy ; but I hated the other boys for taking 
such an absorbing interest in the proceedings. I wished they 
were in Jericho. I felt exquisitely mean when I said cheer- 
fully,- 

" This one does very well ; it fits elegantly. I like a glove 
that fits. No, never mind, ma'am, never mind ; I'll put the 
other on in the street. It is ,/a.rm here." 

It was warm. It was the warmest place I ever was in. I 
paid the bill, and as I passed out with a fascinating bow, I 
thought I detected a light in the woman's eye that was gently 
ironical ; and when I looked back from the street, and she was 
laughing all to herself about something or other, I said to my- 




ENTERTAINING AN ANGEL. 



IN THE EMPIRE OF MOROCCO. 75 

self, with withering sarcasm, " Oh, certainly ; you know how 
to put on kid gloves, don't you ? — a self-complacent ass, ready 
to be nattered out of your senses by every petticoat that 
chooses to take the trouble to do it !" 

The silence of the boys annoyed me. Finally, Dan said, 
musingly : 

" Some gentlemen don't know how to put on kid gloves at 
all ; but some do." 

And the doctor said (to the moon, I thought,) 

" Bat it is always easy to tell when a gentleman is used to 
putting on kid gloves." 

Dan solilopuized, after a pause : 

" Ah, yes ; there is a grace about it that only comes with 
long, very long practice." 

" Yes, indeed, I've noticed that when a man hauls on a kid 
glove like he was dragging a cat out of an ash-hole by the 
tail, he understands putting on kid gloves ; he's had ex — " 

" Boys, enough of a thing 's enough ! You think you are 
very smart, I suppose, but I don't. And if you go and tell 
any of those old gossips in the ship about this thing, I'll never 
forgive you for it ; that 's all." 

They let me alone then, for the time being. We always let 
each other alone in time to prevent ill feeling from spoiling a 
joke. But they had bought gloves, too, as I did. We threw 
all the purchases away together this morning. They were 
coarse, unsubstantial, freckled all over with broad yellow 
splotches, aud could neither stand wear nor public exhibition. 
We had entertained an angel unawares, but we did not take 
her in. She did that for us. 

Tangier ! A tribe of stalwart Moors are wading into the 
sea to carry us ashore on their backs from the small boats. 



OHAPTEE VIII. 

THIS is royal! Let those who went up through Spain 
make the best of it — these dominions of the Emperor of 
Morocco suit our little party well enough. We have had 
enough of Spain at Gibraltar for the present. Tangier is the 
spot we have been longing for all the time. Elsewhere we 
have found foreign-looking things and foreign-looking people, 
but always with things and people intermixed that we were 
familiar with before, and so the novelty of the situation lost a 
deal of its force. We wanted something thoroughly and un- 
compromisingly foreign — foreign from top to bottom — foreign 
from centre to circumference — foreign inside and outside and 
all around — nothing any where about it to dilute its foreign- 
ness— nothing to remind us of any other people or any other 
land under the sun. And lo ! in Tangier we have found it. 
Here is not the slightest thing that ever we have seen save in 
pictures — and we always mistrusted the pictures before. We 
can not any more. The pictures used to seem exaggerations 
— they seemed too weird and fanciful for reality. But behold, 
they were not wild enough — they were not fanciful enough — 
they have not told half the story. Tangier is a foreign land 
if ever there was one ; and the true spirit of it can never be 
found in any book save the Arabian Nights. Here are no 
white men visible, yet swarms of humanity are all about us. 
Here is a packed and jammed city inclosed in a massive stone 
wall which is more than a thousand years old. All the houses 
nearly are one and two-story ; made of thick walls of stone ; 
plastered outside ; square as a dry-goods box ; flat as a floor on 



ORIENTAL WONDERS. 



77 



top; no cornices; whitewashed all over — a crowded city of 
snowy tombs ! And the doors are arched with the peculiar 
arch we see in Moorish pictures ; the floors are laid in vari- 
colored diamond-flags ; in tesselated many-colored porcelain 
squares wrought in the furnaces of Fez ; in red tiles and broad 
bricks that time can not wear ; there is no furniture in the 




VIEW OF A STREET IN TANGIER. 



rooms (of Jewish dwellings) save divans — what there is in 
Moorish ones no man may know ; within their sacred walls no 
Christian dog can enter. And the streets are oriental — some 
of them three feet wide, some six, but only two that are over 
a dozen ; a man can blockade the most of them by extending 
his body across them. Isn't it an oriental picture % 

There are stalwart Bedouins of the desert here, and stately 
Moors, proud of a history that goes back to the night of time ; 
and Jews, whose fathers fled hither centuries upon centuries 
ago; and swarthy Biffians from the mountains — born cut- 



78 A FUNNY TOWN. 

throats — and original, genuine negroes, as black as Moses ; and 
howling dervishes, and a hundred breeds of Arabs — all sorts 
and descriptions of people that are foreign and curious to look 
upon. 

And their dresses are strange beyond all description. Here 
is a bronzed Moor in a prodigious white turban, curiously em- 
broidered jacket, gold and crimson sash, of many folds, 
wrapped round and round his waist, trowsers that only come 
a little below his knee, and yet have twenty yards of stuff in 
them, ornamented scimetar, bare shins, stockingless feet, yellow 
clippers, and gun of preposterous length — a mere soldier ! — I 
thought he was the Emperor at least. And here are aged 
Moors with flowing white beards, and long white robes with 
vast cowls ; and Bedouins with long, cowled, striped cloaks, 
and negroes and Riffians with heads clean-shaven, except a 
kinky scalp-lock back of the ear, or rather up on the after 
corner of the skull, and all sorts of barbarians in all sorts of 
weird costumes, and all more or less ragged. And here are 
Moorish women who are enveloped from head to foot in coarse 
white robes and whose sex can only be determined by the fact 
that they only leave one eye visible, and never look at men of 
their own race, or are looked at by them in public. Here are 
five thousand Jews in blue gaberdines, sashes about their 
waists, slippers upon their feet, little skull-caps upon the 
backs of their heads, hair combed down on the forehead, and 
cut straight across the middle of it from side to side — the self- 
same fashion their Tangier ancestors have worn for I don't 
know how many bewildering centuries. Their feet and ankles 
are bare. Their noses are all hooked, and hooked alike. They 
all resemble each other so much that one could almost believe 
they were of one family. Their women are plump and pretty, 
and do smile upon a Christian in a way which is in the last 
degree comforting. 

What a funny old town it is ! It seems like profanation t© 
laugh, and jest, and bandy the frivolous chat of our day amid 
its hoary relics. Only the stately phraseology and the meas- 
ured speech of the sons of the Prophet are suited to a vener- 



A CRADLE OF ANTIQUITY. 79 

able antiquity like this. Here is a crumbling wall that was 
©Id when Columbus discovered America ; was old when Peter 
the Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages to 
arm for the first Crusade ; was old when Charlemagne and his 
paladins beleaguered enchanted castles and battled with giants 
and genii in the fabled days of the olden time ; was old when 
Christ and his disciples walked the earth ; stood where it 
stands to-day when the lips of Memnon were vocal, and men 
bought and sold in the streets of ancient Thebes ! 

The Phoenicians, the Carthagenians, the English, Moors, 
Eomans, all have battled for Tangier — all have won it and 
lost it. Here is a ragged, oriental-looking negro from some 
desert place in interior Africa, filling his goat-skin with water 
from a stained and battered fountain built by the Eomans 
twelve hundred years ago. Yonder is a ruined arch of a bridge 
built by Julius Caesar nineteen hundred years ago. Men who 
had seen the infant Saviour in the Yirgin's arms, have stood 
upon it, may be. 

Near it are the ruins of a dock-yard where Caesar repaired 
his ships and loaded them with grain when he invaded Britain, 
fifty years before the Christian era. 

Here, under the quiet stars, these old streets seem thronged 
with the phantoms of forgotten ages. My eyes are resting 
upon a spot where stood a monument which was seen and 
described by Roman historians less than two thousand years 
ago, whereon was inscribed : 

"We are the Canaanites. We are they that have 
been driven out of the land of canaan by the jewish 
robber, Joshua." 

Joshua drove them out, and they came here. Not many 
leagues from here is a tribe of Jews whose ancestors fled 
thither after an unsuccessful revolt against King David, and 
these their descendants are still under a ban and keep to them- 
selves. 

Tangier has been mentioned in history for three thousand 
years. And it was a town, though a queer one, when Her- 



y 



80 STORES AND MERCHANTS. 

cules, clad in his lion-skin, landed here, four thousand years 
ago. In these streets he met Anitus, the king of the country, 
| and brained him with his club, which was the fashion among 
gentlemen in those days. The people of Tangier (called 
Tingis, then,) lived in the rudest possible huts, and dressed in 
skins and carried clubs, and were as savage as the wild beasts 
they were constantly obliged to war with. But they were a 
gentlemanly race, and did no work. They lived on the natural 
products of the land. Their king's country residence was at 
the famous Garden of Hesperides, seventy miles down the 
coast from here. The garden, with its golden apples, (oranges,) 
is gone now — no vestige of it remains. Antiquarians concede 
that such a personage as Hercules did exist in ancient times, 
and agree that he was an enterprising and energetic man, but 
decline to believe him a good, bona fide god, because that 
would be unconstitutional. 

Down here at Cape Spartel is the celebrated cave of Her- 
cules, where that hero took refuge when he was vanquished 
and driven out of the Tangier country. It is full of inscrip- 
tions in the dead languages, which fact makes me think Her- 
cules could not have traveled much, else he would not have 
kept a journal. 

Five days' journey from here — say two hundred miles — are 
the ruins of an ancient city, of whose history there is neither 
record nor tradition. And yet its arches, its columns, and its 
statues, proclaim it to have been built by an enlightened 
race. 

The general size of a store in Tangier is about that of an 
ordinary shower-bath in a civilized land. The Mohammedan 
merchant, tinman, shoemaker, or vendor of trifles, sits cross- 
legged on the floor, and reaches after any article you may want 
to buy. You can rent a whole block of these pigeon-holes for 
fifty dollars a month. The market people crowd the market- 
place with their baskets of figs, dates, melons, apricots, etc., 
and among them file trains of laden asses, not much larger, if 
any, than a Newfoundland dog. The scene is lively, is pic- 
turesque, and smells like a police court. The Jewish money- 



WE BECOME WEALTHY 



81 




CHANGE FOR A NAPOLEON. 



changers have their dens close at hand ; and all day long are 
counting bronze coins and transferring them from one bushel 

basket to another. They 
don't coin much money 
now-a-days, I think. I saw 
none but what was dated 
four or five hundred years 
back, and was badly worn 
and battered. These coins 
are not very valuable. 
Jack went out to get a 
Napoleon changed, so as 
to have money suited to 
the general cheapness of 
things, and came back and 
said he had " swamped the 
bank; had bought eleven 
quarts of coin, and the 
head of the firm had gone 
on the street to negotiate for the balance of the change." I 
bought nearly half a pint of their money for a shilling myself. 
I am not proud on account of having so much money, though. 
I care nothing for wealth. 

The Moors have some small silver coins, and also some 
silver slugs worth a dollar each. The latter are exceedingly 
scarce — so much so that when poor ragged Arabs see one they 
beg to be allowed to kiss it. 

They have also a small gold coin worth two dollars. And 
that reminds me of something. When Morocco is in a state 
of war, Arab couriers carry letters through the country, and 
charge a liberal postage. Every now and then they fall into 
the hands of marauding bands and get robbed. Therefore, 
warned by experience, as soon as they have collected two dol- 
lars' worth of money they exchange it for one of those little 
gold pieces, and when robbers come upon them, swallow it. 
The stratagem was good while it was unsuspected, but after 
that -the marauders simply gave the sagacious United States 
mail an emetic and sat down to wait. 



82 CURIOUS REVENUE SYSTEM. 

The Emperor of Morocco is a soulless despot, and the great 
officers under him are despots on a smaller scale. There is no 
regular system of taxation, but when the Emperor or the 
Bashaw want money, they levy on some rich man, and he has 
to furnish the cash or go to prison. Therefore, few men in 
Morocco dare to be rich. It is too dangerous a luxury. Yanity 
occasionally leads a man to display wealth, but sooner or later 
the Emperor trumps up a charge against him — any sort of one 
will do — and confiscates his property. Of course, there are 
many rich men in the empire, but their money is buried, and 
they dress in rags and counterfeit poverty. Every now and 
then the Emperor imprisons a man who is suspected of the 
crime of being rich, and makes things so uncomfortable for 
him that he is forced to discover where he has hidden hi* 
money. 

Moors and Jews sometimes place themselves under the pro- 
tection of the foreign consuls, and then they can flout their 
riches in the Emperor's face with impunity. 



CHAPTEK IX. 

ABOUT the first adventure we had yesterday afternoon, 
after landing here, came near finishing that heedless 
Blucher. We had just mounted some mules and asses, 
and started out under the guardianship of the stately, 
the princely, the magnificent Hadji Mohammed Lamarty, 
(may his tribe increase !) when we came upon a fine Moorish 
mosque, with tall tower, rich with checker-work of many- 
colored porcelain, and every part and portion of the edifice 
adorned with the quaint architecture of the Alhambra, and 
Blucher started to ride into the open door-way. A startling 
"Hi-hi!" from our camp-followers, and a loud "Halt!" from 
an English gentleman in the party checked the adventurer, 
and then we were informed that so dire a profanation is it for 
a Christian dog to set foot upon the sacred threshold of a 
Moorish mosque, that no amount of purification can ever 
make it fit for the faithful to pray in again. Had Blucher 
succeeded in entering the place, he would no doubt have been 
chased through the town and stoned ; and the time has been, 
and not many years ago either, when a Christian would have 
been most ruthlessly slaughtered, if captured in a mosque. 
We caught a glimpse of the handsome tesselated pavements 
within, and of the devotees performing their ablutions at the 
fountains ; but even that we took that glimpse was a thing not 
relished by the Moorish bystanders. 

Some years ago the clock in the tower of the mosque got 
out of order. The Moors of Tangier have so degenerated that 
it has been long since there was an artificer among them 



84 MOORISH PUNISHMENTS FOR CRIME. 

capable of curing so delicate a patient as a debilitated clock. 
The great men of the city met in solemn conclave to consider 
how the difficulty was to be met. They discussed the matter 
thoroughly but arrived at no solution. Finally, a patriarch 
arose and said: 

" Oh, children of the Prophet, it is known unto you that a 
Portuguee dog of a Christian clock-mender pollutes the city of 
Tangier with his presence. Ye know, also, that when mosques 
are builded, asses bear the stones and the cement, and cross 
the sacred threshold. Now, therefore, send the Christian dog 
on all fours, and barefoot, into the holy place to mend the 
clock, and let him go as an ass !" 

And in that way it was done. Therefore, if Blucher ever 
sees the inside of a mosque, he will have to cast aside his 
humanity and go in his natural character. We visited the 
jail, and found Moorish prisoners making mats and baskets. 
(This thing of utilizing crime savors of civilization.) Murder 
is punished with death. A short time ago, three murderers 
were taken beyond the city walls and shot. Moorish guns are 
not good, and neither are Moorish marksmen. In this in- 
stance, they set up the poor criminals at long range, like so 
many targets, and practiced on them — kept them hopping 
about and dodging bullets for half an hour before they man- 
aged to drive the centre. 

When a man steals cattle, they cut off his right hand and 
left leg, and nail them up in the market-place as a warning to 
every body. Their surgery is not artistic. They slice around 
the bone a little ; then break off" the limb. Sometimes the 
patient gets well ; but, as a general thing, he don't. How- 
ever, the Moorish heart is stout. The Moors were always 
brave. These criminals undergo the fearful operation without 
a wince, without a tremor of any kind, without a groan ! No 
amount of suffering can bring down the pride of a Moor, or 
make him shame his dignity with a cry. 

Here, marriage is contracted by the parents of the parties 
to it. There are no valentines, no stolen interviews, no riding 
out, no courting in dim parlors, no lovers' quarrels and recon- 



THREE SUNDAYS IN A WEEK. 85 

ciliations — no nothing that is proper to approaching matri- 
mony. The young man takes the girl his father selects for 
him, marries her, and after that she is unveiled, and he sees 
her for the first time. If, after due acquaintance, she suits 
him, he retains her ; but if he suspects her purity, he bundles 
her back to her father ; if he finds her diseased, the same ; 
or if, after just and reasonable time is allowed her, she neg- 
lects to bear children, back she goes to the home of her child- 
hood. 

Mohammedans here, who can afford it, keep a good many 
wives on hand. They are called wives, though I believe the 
Koran only allows four genuine wives — the rest are concu- 
bines. The Emperor of Morocco don't know how many 
wives he has, but thinks he has five hundred. However, that 
is near enough — a dozen or so, one way or the other, don't 
matter. 

Even the Jews in the interior have a plurality of wives. 

I have caught a glimpse of the faces of several Moorish 
women, (for they are only human, and will expose their faces 
for the admiration of a Christian dog when no male Moor 
is by,) and I am full of veneration for the wisdom that leads 
them to cover up such atrocious ugliness. 

They carry their children at their backs, in a sack, like 
other savages the world over. 

Many of the negroes are held in slavery by the Moors. But 
the moment a female slave becomes her master's concubine 
her bonds are broken, and as soon as a male slave can read the 
first chapter of the Koran (which contains the creed,) he can 
no longer be held in bondage. 

They have three Sundays a week in Tangier. The Moham- 
medan's comes on Friday, the Jew's on Saturday, and that of 
the Christian Consuls on Sunday. The Jews are the most 
radical. The Moor goes to his mosque about noon on his 
Sabbath, as on any other day, removes his shoes at the door, 
performs his ablutions, makes his salaams, pressing his fore- 
head to the pavement time and again, says his prayers, and 
goes back to his work. 



86 SHARP PRACTICE OF MOHAMMEDAN PILGRIMS. 

But the Jew shuts up shop ; will not touch copper or bronze 
money at all ; soils his fingers with nothing meaner than silver 
and gold ; attends the synagogue devoutly ; will not cook or 
have any thing to do with fire ; and religiously refrains from 
embarking in any enterprise. 

The Moor who has made a pilgrimage to Mecca is entitled 
to high distinction. Men call him Hadji, and he is thence- 
forward a great personage. Hundreds of Moors come to 
Tangier every year, and embark for Mecca. They go part of 
the way in English steamers ; and the ten or twelve dollars 
they pay for passage is about all the trip costs. They take with 
them a quantity of food, and when the commissary department 
fails they " skirmish," as Jack terms it in his sinful, slangy 
way. From the time they leave till they get home again, 
they never wash, either on land or sea. They are usually 
gone from Ove to seven months, and as they do not change 
their clothes during all that time, they are totally unfit for the 
drawing-room when they get back. 

Many of them have to rake and scrape a long time to 
gather together the ten dollars their steamer passage costs ; 
and when one of them gets back he is a bankrupt forever 
after. Few Moors can ever build up their fortunes again in 
one short lifetime, after so reckless an outlay. In order to 
confine the dignity of Hadji to gentlemen of patrician blood 
and possessions, the Emperor decreed that no man should 
make the pilgrimage save bloated aristocrats who were worth 
a hundred dollars in specie. But behold how iniquity can 
circumvent the law ! For a consideration, the Jewish money- 
changer lends the pilgrim one hundred dollars long enough 
for him to swear himself through, and then receives it back 
before the ship sails out of the harbor ! 

Spain is the only nation the Moors fear. The reason is, 
that Spain sends her heaviest ships of war and her loudest 
guns to astonish these Moslems ; while America, and other 
nations, send only a little contemptible tub of a gun-boat occa- 
sionally. The Moors, like other savages, learn by what they 
see ; not what they hear or read. We have great fleets in the 



CATS FOR DINNER. 87 

Mediterranean, but they seldom touch at African ports. The 
Moors have a small opinion of England, France, and America, 
and put their representatives to a deal of red tape cir- 
cumlocution before they grant them their common rights, let 
alone a favor. But the moment the Spanish Minister 
makes a demand, it is acceded to at once, whether it be just 
or not. 

Spain chastised the Moors Rye or six years ago, about a dis- 
puted piece of property opposite Gibraltar, and captured the 
city of Tetouan. She compromised on an augmentation of 
her territory ; twenty million dollars indemnity in money ; and 
peace. And then she gave up the city. But she never gave 
it up until the Spanish soldiers had eaten up all the cats. 
They would not compromise as long as the cats held out. 
Spaniards are very fond of cats. On the contrary, the Moors 
reverence cats as something sacred. So the Spaniards touched 
them on a tender point that time. Their unfeline conduct in 
eating up all the Tetouan cats aroused a hatred toward them in 
the breasts of the Moors, to which even the driving them out 
of Spain was tame and passionless. Moors and Spaniards are 
foes forever now. France had a Minister here once who em- 
bittered the nation against him in the most innocent way. 
He killed a couple of battalions of cats (Tangier is full of 
them,) and made a parlor carpet out of their hides. He made 
his carpet in circles — first a circle of old gray tom-cats, with 
their tails all pointing towards the centre; then a circle of 
yellow cats ; next a circle of black cats and a circle of white 
ones ; then a circle of all sorts of cats ; and, finally, a centre- 
piece of assorted kittens. It was very beautiful; but the 
Moors curse his memory to this day. 

When we went to call on our American Consul-General, 
to-day, I noticed that all possible games for parlor amusement 
seemed to be represented on his centre-tables. I thought that 
hinted at lonesomeness. The idea was correct. His is the 
only American family in Tangier. There are many foreign 
Consuls in this place ; but much visiting is not indulged in. 
Tangier is clear out of the world ; and what is the use of 



88 



THE CONSUL'S FAMILY 



visiting when people have nothing on earth to talk about? 
There is none. So each Consul's family stays at home 
chiefly, and amuses itself as best it can. Tangier is full of 
interest for one day, but after that it is a weary prison. The 
Consul-General has been here ^.ye years, and has got enough 
of it to do him for a century, and is going home shortly. His 
family seize upon their letters and papers when the mail 
arrives, read them over and over again for two days or three, 
talk them over and over again for two or three more, till they 
wear them out, and after that, for days together, they eat and 
drink and sleep, and ride out over the same old road, and see 
the same old tiresome things that even decades of centu- 
ries have scarcely changed, and say never a single word ! 




THE CONSULS' FAMILY 



They have literally nothing whatever to talk about. The ar- 
rival of an American man-of-war is a god-send to them. 
" Oh, Solitude, where are the charms which sages have seen in 
thy face?" It is the completest exile that I can conceive of. 
I would seriously recommend to the Government of the 
United States that when a man commits a crime so heinous 



FAREWELL TO TANGIER. 89 

that the law provides no adequate punishment for it, they 
make him Consul-General to Tangier. 

I am glad to have seen Tangier — the second oldest 
town in the world. But I am ready to bid it good bye, I 
believe. 

We shall go hence to Gibraltar this evening or in the morn- 
ing ; and doubtless the Quaker City will sail from that port 
within the next forty-eight hours. 



CHAPTEE X. 

~YTTE passed the Fourth of July on board the Quaker City, 

▼ V in mid-ocean. It was in all respects a characteristic 
Mediterranean day — faultlessly beautiful, A cloudless sky ; a 
refreshing summer wind; a radiant sunshine that glinted 
cheerily from dancing wavelets instead of crested mountains 
of water ; a sea beneath us that was so wonderfully blue, so 
richly, brilliantly blue, that it overcame the dullest sensibilities 
with the spell of its fascination. 

They even have fine sunsets on the Mediterranean — a thing 
that is certainly rare in most quarters of the globe. The even- 
ing we sailed away from Gibraltar, that hard-featured rock 
was swimming in a creamy mist so rich, so soft, so enchant- 
ingly vague and dreamy, that even the Oracle, that serene, 
that inspired, that overpowering humbug, scorned the dinner- 
gong and tarried to worship ! 

He said: "Well, that's gorgis, ain't it! They don't have 
none of them things in our parts, do they ? I consider that 
them effects is on account of the superior refragability, as you 
may say, of the sun's diramic combination with the lymphatic 
forces of the perihelion of Jubiter. What should you think ?" 

" Oh, go to bed !" Dan said that, and went away. 

" Oh, yes, it's all very well to say go to bed when a man 
makes an argument which another man can't answer. Dan 
don't never stand any chance in an argument with me. And 
he knows it, too. What should you say, Jack ?" 

" Now doctor, don't you come bothering around me with 
that dictionary bosh. I don't do you any harm, do I % Then 
you let me alone." 



THE ORACLE IS DELIVERED OF AN OPINION. 91 




"poet lariat." 



" He's gone, too. Well, them fellows have all tackled the old 
Oracle, as they say, but the old man's most too many for 'em. 
May be the Poet Lariat ain't satisfied with them deductions V 

The poet replied with a barbarous rhyme, and went below. 

" 'Pears that he can't 
qualify, neither. Well, 
I didn't expect nothing 
out oihim. I never see 
one of them poets yet 
that knowed any thing. 
He'll go down, now, 
and grind out about four 
reams of the awfullest 
slush about that old 
rock, and give it to a 
consul, or a pilot, or a 
nigger, or any body he 
comes across first which 
he can impose on. Pity 
but somebody'd take that poor old lunatic and dig all that 
poetry rubbage out of him. Why can't a man put his in- 
tellect onto things that's some value ? Gibbons, and Hippo- 
cratus, and Sarcophagus, and all them old ancient philosophers 
was down on poets— " 

" Doctor," I said, " you are going to invent authorities, now, 
and I'll leave you, too. I always enjoy your conversation, 
notwithstanding the luxuriance of your syllables, when the 
philosophy you offer rests on your own responsibility; but 
when you begin to soar — when you begin to support it with 
the evidence of authorities who are the creations of your own 
fancy, I lose confidence." 

That was the way to flatter the doctor. He considered it a 
sort of acknowledgment on my part of a fear to argue with 
him. He was always persecuting the passengers with abstruse 
propositions framed in language that no man could understand, 
and they endured the exquisite torture a minute or two and 
then abandoned the field. A triumph like this, over half a 



92 CELEBRATION CEREMONIES. 

dozen antagonists was sufficient for one day ; from that time 
forward he would patrol the decks beaming blandly upon all 
comers, and so tranquilly, blissfully happy ! 

But I digress. The thunder of our two brave cannon an- 
nounced the Fourth of July, at daylight, to all who were 
awake. But many of us got our information at a later hour, 
from the almanac. All the flags were sent aloft, except half a 
dozen that were needed to decorate portions of the ship below, 
and in a short time the vessel assumed a holiday appearance. 
During the morning, meetings were held and all manner of 
committees set to work on the celebration ceremonies. In the 
afternoon the ship's company assembled aft, on deck, under the 
awnings; the flute, the asthmatic melodeon, and the con- 
sumptive clarinet crippled the Star Spangled Banner, the choir 
chased it to cover, and George came in with a peculiarly lacer- 
ating screech on the final note and slaughtered it. Nobody 
mourned. 

We carried out the corpse on three cheers (that joke was not 
intentional and I do not indorse it,) and then the President, 
throned behind a cable-locker with a national flag spread over 
it, announced the " Reader," who rose up and read that same 
old Declaration of Independence which we have all listened to 
so often without paying any attention to what it said ; and 
after that the President piped the Orator of the Day to quar- 
ters and he made that same old speech about our national 
greatness which we so religiously believe and so fervently ap- 
plaud. Now came the choir into court again, with the com- 
plaining instruments, and assaulted Hail Columbia ; and when 
victory hung wavering in the scale, George returned with his 
dreadful wild-goose stop turned on and the choir won of course. 
A minister pronounced the benediction, and the patriotic little 
gathering disbanded. The Fourth of July was safe, as far as 
the Mediterranean was concerned. 

At dinner in the evening, a well- written original poem was 
recited with spirit by one of the ship's captains, and thirteen 
regular toasts were washed down with several baskets of cham- 
pagne. The speeches were bad — execrable, almost without 



THE CAPTAIN'S ELOQUENT ADDRESS. 93 

exception. In tact, without any exception, but one. Capt. 
Duncan made a good speech ; he made the only good speech 
of the evening. He said : 

" Ladies and Gentlemen : — May we all live to a green old 
age, and be prosperous and happy. Steward, bring up another 
basket of champagne." 

It was regarded as a very able effort. 

The festivities, so to speak, closed with another of those 
miraculous balls on the promenade deck. We were not used 
to dancing on an even keel, though, and it was only a ques- 
tionable success. But take it altogether, it was a bright, cheer- 
ful, pleasant Fourth. 

Toward nightfall, the next evening, we steamed into the 
great artificial harbor of this noble city of Marseilles, and saw 
the dying sunlight gild its clustering spires and ramparts, and 
flood its leagues of environing verdure with a mellow radiance 
that touched with an added charm the white villas that flecked the 
landscape far and near. [Copyright secured according to law.] 

There were no stages out, and we could not get on the pier 
from the ship. It was annoying. We were full of enthusi- 
asm — we wanted to see France ! Just at nightfall our party 
of three contracted with a waterman for the privilege of using 
his boat as a bridge — its stern was at our companion ladder and 
its bow touched the pier. We got in and the fellow backed 
out into the harbor. 1 told him in French that all we wanted 
was to walk over his thwarts and step ashore, and asked him 
what he went away out there for ? He said he could not un- 
derstand me. I repeated. Still, he could not understand. 
He appeared to be very ignorant of French. The doctor tried 
him, but he could not understand the doctor. I asked this 
boatman to explain his conduct, which he did ; and then I 
couldn't understand him. Dan said : 

" Oh, go to the pier, you old fool — that's where we want to go !" 

We reasoned calmly with Dan that it was useless to speak 
to this foreigner in English — that he had better let us conduct 
this business in the French language and not let the stranger 
see how uncultivated he was. 



94 "avez-vous du vin?" 

"Well, go on, go on," he said, "don't mind me. I don't 
wish to interfere. Only, if you go on telling him in your kind 
of French he never will find out where we want to go to. 
That is what I think about it." 

We rebuked him severely for this remark, and said we never 
knew an ignorant person yet but was prejudiced. The French- 
man spoke again, and the doctor said : 

" There, now, Dan, he says he is going to allez to the douain. 
Means he is going to the hotel. Oh, certainly — we don't know 
the French language." 

This was a crusher, as Jack would say. It silenced further 
criticism from the disaffected member. We coasted past the 
sharp bows of a navy of great steamships, and stopped at last 
at a government building on a stone pier. It was easy to re- 
member then, that the douain was the custom-house, and not 
the hotel. We did not mention it, however. With winning 
French politeness, the officers merely opened and closed our 
satchels, declined to examine our passports, and sent us on our 
way. We stopped at the first cafe* we came to, and entered. 
An old woman seated us at a table and waited for orders. 
The doctor said : 

" Avez vous du vin ?" 

The dame looked perplexed. The doctor said again, with 
elaborate distinctness of articulation : 

" Avez-vous du — vin !" 

The dame looked more perplexed than before. I said : 

" Doctor, there is a flaw in your pronunciation somewhere. 
Let me try her. Madame, avez-vous du vin ? It isn't any use, 
doctor — take the witness." 

"Madame, avez-vous du vin — ou fromage — pain — pickled 
pigs' feet — beurre — des cefs — du beuf — horse-radish, sour-crout, 
hog and hominy — any thing, any thing in the world that can 
stay a Christian stomach !" 

She said : 

" Bless you, why didn't you speak English before ? — I don't 
know any thing about your plagued French !" 

The humiliating taunts of the disaffected member spoiled 



FIKST SUPPER IN FRANCE, 



95 



the supper, and we dispatched it in angry silence and got away 
as soon as we could. Here we were in beautiful France — in a 
vast stone house of quaint architecture — surrounded by all 




FIRST SUPPER IN FRANCE. 



manner of curiously worded French signs — stared at by 
strangely-habited, bearded French people — every thing grad- 
ually and surely forcing upon us the coveted consciousness that 
at last, and beyond all question we were in beautiful France and 
absorbing its nature to the forgetfulness of every thing else, 
and coming to feel the happy romance of the thing in all its 
enchanting delightfulness — and to think of this skinny veteran 
intruding with her vile English, at such a moment, to blow the 
fair vision to the winds ! It was exasperating. 

We set out to find the centre of the city, inquiring the di- 
rection every now and then. We never did succeed in making 
any body understand just exactly what we wanted, and neither 
did we ever succeed in comprehending just exactly what they 



96 



LOST. — FOUND 




POINTING. 



said in reply — but then they always pointed — they always did 
that, and we bowed politely and said "Merci, Monsieur," and 
so it was a blighting triumph over the disaffected member, 

any way. He was restive under 
these victories and often asked : 
" What did that pirate say?" 
" Why, he told us which way 
-*o go, to find the Grand Casino." 
" Yes, but what did he say?" 
" Oh, it don't matter what he 
said — we understood him. These 
are educated people — not like that 
absurd boatman." 

"Well, I wish they were edu- 
cated enough to tell a man a di- 
rection that goes some where — 
for we've been going around in 
a circle for an hour — I've passed 
this same old drug store seven times." 

We said it was a low, disreputable falsehood, (but we 
knew it was not.) It was plain that it would not do to pass 
that drug store again, though — we might go on asking direc- 
tions, but we must cease from following finger-pointings if we 
hoped to check the suspicions of the disaffected member. 

A long walk through smooth, asphaltum-paved streets bor- 
dered by blocks of vast new mercantile houses of cream-colored 
stone, — every house and every block precisely like all the other 
houses and all the other blocks for a mile, and all brilliantly 
lighted, — brought us at last to the principal thoroughfare. On 
every hand were bright colors, flashing constellations of gas- 
burners, gaily dressed men and women thronging the side- 
walks — hurry, life, activity, cheerfulness, conversation and 
laughter every where ! We found the Grand Hotel du Louvre 
et de la Paix, and wrote down who we were, where we were 
born, what our occupations were, the place we came from last, 
whether we were married or single, how we liked it, how old 
we were, where we were bound for and when we expected to 



A FRENCHY SCENE. 97 

get there, and a great deal of information of similar import- 
ance — all for the benefit of the landlord and the secret police. 
We hired a guide and began the business of sight-seeing im- 
mediately. That first night on French soil was a stirring one. 
I can not think of half the places we went to, or what we par- 
ticularly saw ; we had no disposition to examine carefully into 
any thing at all — we only wanted to glance and go — to move, 
keep moving ! The spirit of the country was upon us. We 
sat down, finally, at a late hour, in the great Casino, and called 
for unstinted champagne. It is so easy to be bloated aristocrats 
where it costs nothing of consequence ! There were about five 
hundred people in that dazzling place, I suppose, though the 
walls being papered entirely with mirrors, so to speak, one could 
not really tell but that there were a hundred thousand. 
Young, daintily dressed exquisites and young, stylishly dressed 
women, and also old gentlemen and old ladies, sat in couples 
and groups about innumerable marble-topped tables, and ate 
fancy suppers, drank wine and kept up a chattering of con- 
versation that was dazing to the senses. There was a stage 
at the far end, and a large orchestra ; and every now and then 
actors and actresses in preposterous comic dresses came out 
and sang the most extravagantly funny songs, to judge by 
their absurd actions ; but that audience merely suspended its 
chatter, stared cynically, and never once smiled, never once 
applauded ! I had always thought that Frenchmen were ready 
to laugh at any thing. 

7 



CHAPTEE XI. 

~TT7~E are getting foreignized rapidly, and with facility, 
▼ ▼ We are getting reconciled to halls and bed-chambers 
with unhomelike stone floors, and no carpets — floors that ring 
to the tread of one's heels with a sharpness that is death tG 
sentimental musing. We are getting nsed to tidy, noiseless 
waiters, who glide hither and thither, and hover about your 
back and your elbows like butterflies, quick to comprehend 
orders, quick to fill them ; thankful for a gratuity without re- 
gard to the amount ; and always polite — never otherwise than 
polite. That is the strangest curiosity yet — a really polite 
hotel waiter who isn't an idiot. We are getting used to driv- 
ing right into the central court of the hotel, in the midst of a 
fragrant circle of vines and flowers, and in the midst, also, of 
parties of gentlemen sitting quietly reading the paper and 
smoking. We are getting used to ice frozen by artificial pro- 
cess in ordinary bottles — the only kind of ice they have here. 
We are getting used to all these things ; but we are not getting 
used to carrying our own soap. We are sufficiently civilized 
to carry our own combs and tooth-brushes ; but this thing of 
having to ring for soap every time we wash is new to us, and 
not pleasant at all. We think of it just after we get our 
heads and faces thoroughly wet, or just when we think we 
have been in the bath-tub long enough, and then, of course, an 
annoying delay follows. These Marseillaise make Marseillaise 
hymns, and Marseilles vests, and Marseilles soap for all the 
world ; but they never sing their hymns, or wear their Tests, 
or wash with their soap themselves. 



RINGING FOR SOAP. 



W 



We have learned to go through the lingering routine of the 
table d'hote with patience, with serenity, with satisfaction. 
We take soup ; then 
wait a few minutes 
for the fish; a few 
minutes more and 
the plates are chang- 
ed, and the roast 
beef comes ; another 
change and we take 
peas; change again 
and take lentils ; 
change and take 
snail patties (I pre- 
fer grasshoppers ;) 
change and take 
roast chicken and sal- 
ad; then strawberry 
pie and ice cream; 
then green figs, 
pears, oranges, green 
almonds, &c. ; finally 
coffee. Wine with 

every course, of course, being in France. With such a cargo 
on board, digestion is a slow process, and we must sit long in 
the cool chambers and smoke — and read French newspapers, 
which have a strange fashion of telling a perfectly straight 
story till you get to the " nub " of it, and then a word drops in 
that no man can translate, and that story is ruined. An em- 
bankment fell on some Frenchmen yesterday, and the papers 
are full of it to-day — but whether those sufferers were killed, 
or crippled, or bruised, or only scared, is more than I can pos- 
sibly make out, and yet I would just give any thing to know. 

We were troubled a little at dinner to-day, by the conduct 
of an American, who talked very loudly and coarsely, and 
laughed boisterously where all others were so quiet and well- 
behaved. He ordered wine with a royal flourish, and said : 




RINGING FOR SOAP. 



100 



"AN AMERICAN, SIR!" 




WINE, SIRl 



" I never dine without wine, sir," (which was a painful false- 
hood,) and looked around upon the company to bask in the 
admiration he expected to find in their faces. All these airs 

in a land where they would 
as soon expect to leave the 
soup out of the bill of fare 
as the wine! — in a land 
where wine is nearly as 
common among all ranks 
as water! This fellow 
said : "I am a free-born 
sovereign, sir, an Ameri- 
can, sir, and I want every 
body to know it!" He 
did not mention that he 
was a lineal descendant of 
Balaam's ass; but every 
body knew that without 
his telling it. 
We have driven in the Prado — that superb avenue bordered 
with patrician mansions and noble shade-trees — and have 
visited the Chateau Boarely and its curious museum. They 
showed us a miniature cemetery there — a copy of the 
first graveyard that was ever in Marseilles, no doubt. The 
delicate little skeletons were lying in broken vaults, and had 
their household gods and kitchen utensils with them. The 
original of this cemetery was dug up in the principal street 
of the city a few years ago. It had remained there, only twelve 
feet under ground, for a matter of twenty-five hundred years, 
or thereabouts. Romulus was here before he built Rome, and 
thought something of founding a city on this spot, but gave 
up the idea. He may have been personally acquainted with 
some of these Phoenicians whose skeletons we have been ex- 
amining. 

In the great Zoological Gardens, we found specimens of all 
the animals the world produces, I think, including a drome- 
dary, a monkey ornamented with tufts of brilliant blue and 



THE "PILGRIM" BIRD 



101 



carmine hair — a very gorgeous monkey lie was — a hippopot- 
amus from the Nile, and a sort of tall, long-legged bird with a 
beak like a powder-horn, and close-fitting wings like the tails 
of a dress coat. This fellow stood up with his eyes shut and 
his shoulders stooped forward a little, and looked as if he had 
his hands under his coat tails. Such tranquil stupidity, such 
supernatural gravity, such self-righteousness, and such ineffa- 
ble self-complacency as were in the countenance and attitude 
of tiiau gray-bodied, dark-winged, bald-headed, and pre- 
posterously uncomely bird ! He was so ungainly, so pimplj 
about the head, so scaly about the legs ; yet so serene, so un- 
speakably satisfied ! He was the most comical looking creature 
that can be imagined. It 
was good to hear Dan and 
the doctor laugh — such nat- 
ural and such enjoyable 
laughter had not been heard 
among our excursionists 
since our ship sailed away 
from America. This bird 
was a god-send to us, and I 
should be an ingrate if I 
forgot to make honorable 
mention of him in these 
pages. Ours was a pleas- 
ure excursion ; therefore we 
stayed with that bird an 
hour, and made the most of 
him. We stirred him up 
occasionally, but he only 
unclosed an eye and slowly 
closed it again, abating no 
jot of his stately piety of 
demeanor or his tremendous 
seriousness. He only seemed to say, " Defile not Heaven's 
anointed with unsanctified hands." We did not know his 
name, and so we called him " The Pilgrim." Dan said : 




THE PILGRIM. 



102 STKANGE COMPANIONSHIP. 

" All he wants now is a Plymouth Collection." 
The boon companion of the colossal elephant was a com- 
mon cat! This cat had a fashion of climbing up the ele- 
phant's hind legs, and roosting on his back. She would sit 
up there, with her paws curved under her breast, and sleep in 
the sun half the afternoon. It used to annoy the elephant at 
first, and he would reach up and take her down, but she would 
go aft and climb up again. She persisted until she finally 
conquered the elephant's prejudices, and now they are insep- 
arable friends. The cat plays about her comrade's forefeet or 
his trunk often, until dogs approach, and then she goes aloft 
out of danger. The elephant has annihilated several doga 
lately, that pressed his companion too closely. 

We hired a sail-boat and a guide and made an excursion to 
one of the small islands in the harbor to visit the Castle d'If. 
This ancient fortress has a melancholy history. It has been 
used as a prison for political offenders for two or three hun- 
dred years, and its dungeon walls are scarred with the rudely 
carved names of many and many a captive who fretted his 
life away here, and left no record of himself but these sad 
epitaphs wrought with his own hands. How thick the names 
were ! And their long-departed owners seemed to throng the 
gloomy cells and corridors with their phantom shapes. We 
loitered through dungeon after dungeon, away down into the 
living rock below the level of the sea, it seemed. Names 
every where ! — some plebeian, some noble, some even princely. 
Plebeian, prince, and noble, had one solicitude in common — they 
would not be forgotten! They could suffer solitude, inac- 
tivity, and the horrors of a silence that no sound ever dis- 
turbed ; but they could not bear the thought of being utterly 
forgotten by the world. Hence the carved names. In one 
cell, where a little light penetrated, a man had lived twenty- 
seven years without seeing the face of a human being — lived 
in filth and wretchedness, with no companionship but his own 
thoughts, and they were sorrowful enough, and hopeless 
enough, no doubt. Whatever his jailers considered that he 
needed was conveyed to his cell by night, through a wicket. 



A LONG CAPTIVITY. 



103 



This man carved the walls of his prison-house from floor to 
roof with all manner of figures of men and animals, grouped 




in intricate designs. He had 
toiled there year after year, at 
his self-appointed task, while 
infants grew to boyhood — to vigorous youth — idled through 
school and college — acquired a profession — claimed man's ma- 
ture estate — married and looked back to infancy as to a thing 



104: DUNGEON OF THE "IKON MASK." 

of some vague, ancient time, almost. But who shall tell how 
many ages it seemed to this prisoner ? With the one, time 
flew sometimes; with the other, never — it crawled always. 
To the one, nights spent in dancing had seemed made of 
minutes instead of hours ; to the other, those self-same nights 
had been like all other nights of dungeon life, and seemed 
made of slow, dragging weeks, instead of hours and minutes. 

One prisoner of fifteen years had scratched verses upon his 
walls, and brief prose sentences — brief, but full of pathos. These 
spoke not of himself and his hard estate ; but only of the shrine 
where his spirit fled the prison to worship — of home and the 
idols that were templed there. He never lived to see them. 

The walls of these dungeons are as thick as some bed-cham- 
bers at home are wide — fifteen feet. "We saw the damp, dis- 
mal cells in which two of Dumas' heroes passed their confine- 
ment — heroes of " Monte Christo." It was here that the 
brave Abb6 wrote a book with his own blood ; with a pen 
made of a piece of iron hoop, and by the light of a lamp made 
out of shreds of cloth soaked in grease obtained from his food ; 
and then dug through the thick wall with some trifling instru- 
ment which he wrought himself out of a stray piece of iron or 
table cutlery, and freed D antes from his chains. It was a pity 
that so many weeks of dreary labor should have come to 
naught at last. 

They showed us the noisome cell where the celebrated 
" Iron Mask " — that ill-starred brother of a hard-hearted king 
of France — was confined for a season, before he was sent to 
hide the strange mystery of his life from the curious in the 
dungeons of St. Marguerite. The place had a far greater 
interest for us than it could have had if we had known be- 
yond all question who the Iron Mask was, and what his his- 
tory had been, and why this most unusual punishment had been 
meted out to him. Mystery ! That was the charm. That 
speechless tongue, those prisoned features, that heart so 
freighted with unspoken troubles, and that breast so oppressed 
with its piteous secret, had been here. These dank walls had 
known the man whose dolorous story is a sealed book forever ! 
There was fascination in the spot . 



CHAPTEE XII. 

WE have come five hundred miles by rail through the 
heart of France. What a bewitching land it is ! — 
What a garden ! Surely the leagues of bright green lawns 
are swept and brushed and watered every day and their 
grasses trimmed by the barber. Surely the hedges are shaped 
and measured and their symmetry preserved by the most 
architectural of gardeners. Surely the long straight rows of 
stately poplars that divide the beautiful landscape like the 
squares of a checker-board are set with line and plummet, and 
their uniform height determined with a spirit level. Surely 
the straight, smooth, pure white turnpikes are jack-planed and 
sandpapered every day. How else are these marvels of sym- 
metry, cleanliness and order attained ? It is wonderful. There 
are no unsightly stone walls, and never a fence of any kind. 
There is no dirt, no decay, no rubbish any where — nothing 
that even hints at untidiness — nothing that ever suggests 
neglect. All is orderly and beautiful — every thing is charming 
to the eye. 

We had such glimpses of the Rhone gliding along between 
its grassy banks ; of cosy cottages buried in flowers and shrub- 
bery; of quaint old red-tiled villages with mossy mediaeval 
cathedrals looming out of their midst ; of wooded hills with 
ivy-grown towers and turrets of feudal castles projecting above 
the foliage ; such glimpses of Paradise, it seemed to us, such 
visions of fabled fairy-land ! 

We knew, then, what the poet meant, when he sang of— 

" — thy cornfields green, and sunny rines. 
pleasant land of France 1" 



106 SUMMER GARB OF THE LANDSCAPE. 

And itwa pleasant land. No word describes it so felici- 
tously as that one. They say there is no word for " home " in 
the French language. Well, considering that they have the 
article itself in such an attractive aspect, they ought to manage 
to get along without the word. Let us not waste too much 
pity on "homeless" France. I have observed that French- 
men abroad seldom wholly give up the idea of going back to 
France some time or other. I am not surprised at it now. 

We are not infatuated with these French railway cars, 
though. We took first class passage, not because we wished 
to attract attention by doing a thing which is uncommon in 
Europe, but because we could make our journey quicker by so 
doing. It is hard to make railroading pleasant, in any country. 
It is too tedious. Stage-coaching is infinitely more delightful. 
Once I crossed the plains and deserts and mountains of the 
West, in a stage-coach, from the Missouri line to California, 
and since then all my pleasure trips must be measured to that 
rare holiday frolic. Two thousand miles of ceaseless rush and 
rattle and clatter, by night and by day, and never a weary 
moment, never a lapse of interest ! The first seven hundred 
miles a level continent, its grassy carpet greener and softer 
and smoother than any sea, and figured with designs fitted to 
its magnitude — the shadows of the clouds. Here were n© 
scenes but summer scenes, and no disposition inspired by them 
but to lie at full length on the mail sacks, in the grateful 
breeze, and dreamily smoke the pipe of peace — what other, 
where all was repose and contentment? In cool mornings, 
before the sun was fairly up, it was worth a lifetime of city 
toiling and moiling, to perch in the foretop with the driver 
and see the six mustangs scamper under the sharp snapping 
of a whip that never touched them ; to scan the blue distances 
of a world that knew no lords but us ; to cleave the wind with 
uncovered head and feel the sluggish pulses rousing to the spirit 
of a speed that pretended to the resistless rush of a typhoon ! 
Then thirteen hundred miles of desert solitudes ; of limitless 
panoramas of bewildering perspective ; of mimic cities, of pin- 
nacled cathedrals, of massive fortresses, counterfeited in the 



PECULIARITIES OF FRENCH CARS. 107 

eternal rocks and splendid with the crimson and gold of the 
setting sun ; of dizzy altitudes among fog- wreathed peaks and 
never-melting snows, where thunders and lightnings and tem- 
pests warred magnificently at our feet and the storm-clouds 
above swung their shredded banners in our very faces ! 

But I forgot. I am in elegant France, now, and not skur- 
rying through the great South Pass and the Wind River 
Mountains, among antelopes and buffaloes, and painted In- 
dians on the war path. It is not meet that I should make too 
disparaging comparisons between hum-drum travel on a rail- 
way and that royal summer flight across a continent in a 
stage-coach. I meant in the beginning, to say that railway 
journeying is tedious and tiresome, and so it is — though at the 
time, I was thinking particularly of a dismal fifty-hour pil- 
grimage between New York and St. Louis. Of course our 
trip through France was not really tedious, because all its 
scenes and experiences were new and strange ; but as Dan 
says,, it had its " discrepancies." 

The cars are built in compartments that hold eight persons 
each. Each compartment is partially subdivided, and so there 
are two tolerably distinct parties of four m it. Four face the 
other four. The seats and backs are thickly padded and cush- 
ioned and are very comfortable ; you can smoke, if you wish ; 
there are no bothersome peddlers ; you are saved the infliction 
of a multitude of disagreeable fellow-passengers. So far, so 
well. But then the conductor locks you in when the train 
starts; there is no water to drink, in the car; there is no 
heating apparatus for night travel ; if a drunken rowdy should 
get in, you could not remove a matter of twenty seats from 
him, or enter another car ; but above all, if you are worn out 
and must sleep, you must sit up and do it in naps, with 
cramped legs and in a torturing misery that leaves you withered 
and lifeless the next day — for behold they have not that culmi- 
nation of all charity and human kindness, a sleeping car, in 
all France. I prefer the American system. It has not so 
many grievous " discrepancies." 

In France, all is clockwork, all is order. They make no 



108 



FRENCH POLITENESS. 



mistakes. Every third man wears a uniform, and whether he 
be a Marshal of the Empire or a brakeman, he is ready and 
perfectly willing to answer all your questions with tireless 
politeness, ready to tell you which car to take, yea, and ready 
to go and put you i #T ito it to make sure that you shall not 
go astray, i'oc can not pass into the waiting-room of :lic 
depot till you have secured your ticket, and you can not pass 
from its only exit till the train is at its threshold to receive 




RAILROAD OFFICIAL IN FRANCE. 



you. Once on board, the train will not start till your ticket 
has been examined — till every passenger's ticket has been 
inspected. This is chiefly for your own good. If by any 
possibility you have managed to take the wrong train, you 
will be handed over to a polite official who will take you 
whither you belong, and bestow you with many an affable 
bow. Your ticket will be inspected every now and then along 
the route, and when it is time to change cars you will know it. 
You are in the hands of officials who zealously study your 
welfare and your interest, instead of turning their talents to 
the invention of new methods of discommoding and snubbing 
you, as is very often the main employment of that exceedingly 
self-satisfied monarch, the railroad conductor of America. 
But the happiest regulation in French railway government, 



"thirty minutes for dinner!" 



109 



-thirty minutes to dinner! No five-minute boltings of 
flabby rolls, muddy coffee, questionable eggs, gutta-percha 
beef, and pies whose conception and execution are a dark and 
bloody mystery to all save the cook who created them ! No ; 
we sat calmly down— it was in old Dijon, which is so easy to 
spell and so impossible to pronounce, except when you civilize 
it and call it Demijohn — and poured out rich Burgundian 
wines and munched calmly through a long table d'hote bill of 
fare, snail-patties, delicious fruits and all, then paid the trifle 
it cost and stepped happily aboard the train again, without 



PAY ■•'' 




FIVE MINUTES FOE REFRESHMENTS." — AMERICA. 



once cursing the railroad company. A rare experience, and 
one to be treasured forever. 

They say they do not have accidents on these French roads, 
and I think it must be true. If I remember rightly, we passed 
high above wagon roads, or through tunnels under them, but 
never crossed them on their own level. About every quarter 
of a mile, it seemed to me, a man came out and held up a club 
till the train went by, to signify that every thing was safe 
ahead. Switches were changed a mile in advance, by pulling 
a wire rope that passed along the ground by the rail, from 



110 



WHY THERE ARE NO ACCIDENTS. 



station to station. Signals for the day and signals for the night 
gave constant and timely notice of the position of switches. 

No, they have no railroad accidents to speak of in France. 
But why ? Because when one occurs, somebody has to hang for 
it ! * Not hang, may be, but be punished at least with such 
vigor of emphasis as to make negligence a thing to be shud- 
dered at by railroad officials for many a day thereafter. " No 
blame attached to the officers " — that lying and disaster-breed- 
ing verdict so common to our soft-hearted juries, is seldom 




"THIRTY MINUTES FOR DINNER!" — FRANCE. 

Tendered in France. If the trouble occurred in the conduct- 
or's department, that officer must suffer if his subordinate 
ean not be proven guilty ; if in the engineer's department, and 
the case be similar, the engineer must answer. 

The Old Travelers — those delightful parrots who have 
H been here before," and know more about the country than 
Louis Napoleon knows now or ever will know, — tell us these 
things, and we believe them because they are pleasant things 
to believe, and because they are plausible and savor of the 



* They go on the principle that it is better that one innocent man should suffer; 
fire hundred. 



THE 



OLD TRAVELERS. 



Ill 



rigid subjection to law and order which we behold about us 
every where. 

But we love the Old Travelers. We love to hear them 
prate, and drivel and lie. We can tell them the moment we 
see them. They always throw out a few feelers ; they never 
cast themselves adrift till they have sounded every individual 
and know that he has 
not traveled. Then 
they open their throt- 
tle-valves, and how 
they do brag, and 
sneer, and swell, and 
soar, and blaspheme 
the sacred name of 
Truth ! Their cen- 
tral idea, their grand 
aim, is to subjugate 
you, keep you down, 
make you feel insig- 
nificant and humble in 
the blaze of their cos- 
mopolitan glory ! They 

will not let you know any thing. They sneer at your most 
inoffensive suggestions ; they laugh unfeelingly at your treas- 
ured dreams of foreign lands ; they brand the statements of 
your traveled aunts and uncles as the stupidest absurdities; 
they deride your most trusted authors and demolish the fair 
images they have set up for your willing worship with the 
pitiless ferocity of the fanatic iconoclast ! But still I love the 
Old Travelers. I love them for their witless platitudes ; for 
their supernatural ability to bore ; for their delightful asinine 
vanity ; for their luxuriant fertility of imagination ; for their 
startling, their brilliant, their overwhelming mendacity ! 

By Lyons and the Saone (where we saw the lady of Lyons 
and thought little of her comeliness ;) by Villa Franca, Ton- 
nere, venerable Sens, Melun, Fontainebleau, and scores of other 
beautiful cities, we swept, always noting the absence of hog- 




THE OLD TRAVELER. 



112 PARIS AT LAST. 

wallows, broken fences, cowlots, unpainted houses and mud, 
and always noting, as well, the presence of cleanliness, grace, 
taste in adorning and beautifying, even to the disposition of a 
tree or the turning of a hedge, the marvel of roads in perfect 
repair, void of ruts and guiltless of even an inequality of sur- 
face — we bowled along, hour after hour, that brilliant summer 
day, and as nightfall approached we entered a wilderness of 
odorous flowers and shrubbery, sped through it, and then, 
excited, delighted, and half persuaded that we were only the 
sport of a beautiful dream, lo, we stood in magnificent Paris ! 

What excellent order they kept about that vast depot! 
There was no frantic crowding and jostling, no shouting and 
swearing, and no swaggering intrusion of services by rowdy 
hackmen. These latter gentry stood outside — stood quietly 
by their long line of vehicles and said never a word. A kind 
of hackman-general seemed to have the whole matter of trans- 
portation in his hands. He politely received the passengers 
and ushered them to the kind of conveyance they wanted, and 
told the driver where to deliver them. There was no " talking 
back," no dissatisfaction about overcharging, no grumbling 
about any thing. In a little while we were speeding through 
the streets of Paris, and delightfully recognizing certain names 
and places with which books had long ago made us familiar. 
It was like meeting an old friend when we read "Rue de 
Rivoli " on the street corner ; we knew the genuine vast palace 
of the Louvre as well as we knew its picture ; when we passed 
by the Column of July we needed no one to tell us what it 
was, or to remind us that on its site once stood the grim Bas- 
tile, that grave of human hopes and happiness, that dismal 
prison-house within whose dungeons so many young faces put 
on the wrinkles of age, so many proud spirits grew humble, so 
many brave hearts broke. 

We secured rooms at the hotel, or rather, we had three beds 
put into one room, so that we might be together, and then we 
went out to a restaurant, just after lamp-lighting, and ate a 
comfortable, satisfactory, lingering dinner. It was a pleasure 
to eat where every thing was so tidy, the food so well cooked, 



SEEING THE SIGHTS. 113 

the waiters so polite, and the coming and departing company 
so monstached, so frisky, so affable, so fearfully and wonder 
fully Frenchy ! All the surroundings were gay and enliven 
ing. Two hundred people sat at little tables on the sidewalk, 
6ipping wine and coffee ; the streets were thronged with light 
vehicles and with joyous pleasure seekers ; there was mmsic 
in the air, life and action all about us, and a conflagration of 
gaslight every where ! 

After dinner we felt like seeing such Parisian specialties as 
we might see without distressing exertion, and so we sauntered 
through the brilliant streets and looked at the dainty trifles in 
variety stores and jewelry shops. Occasionally, merely for the 
pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the 
rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of 
their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled 
them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own 
vile verbs and participles. 

We noticed that in the jewelry stores they had some of tho 
articles marked " gold," and some labeled " imitation." Wo 
wondered at this extravagance of honesty, and inquired into 
the matter. We were informed that inasmuch as most people 
are not able to tell false gold from the genuine article, the 
government compels jewelers to have their gold work assayed 
and stamped officially according to its fineness, and their 
imitation work duly labeled with the sign of its falsity. They 
told us the jewelers would not dare to violate this law, and 
that whatever a stranger bought in one of their stores might 
be depended upon as being strictly what it was represented 
to be. — Yerily, a wonderful land is France ! 

Then we hunted for a barber-shop. From earliest infancy 
it had been a cherished ambition of mine to be shaved some 
day in a palatial barber-shop of Paris. I wished to recline at 
full length in a cushioned invalid chair, with pictures about 
me, and sumptuous furniture ; with frescoed walls and gilded 
arches above me, and vistas of Corinthian columns stretching 
far before me ; with perfumes of Araby to intoxicate my senses, 
and the slumbrous drone of distant noises to soothe me to 

8 



114 jl BARBAROUS ATROCITY. 

sleep. At the end of an hour I would wake up regretfully 
and find my face as smooth and as soft as an infant's. Depart- 
ing, I would lift my hands above that barber's head and say, 
" Heaven bless you, my son !" 

So we searched high and low, for a matter of two hours, but 
never a barber-shop could we see. We saw only wig-making 
establishments, with shocks of dead and repulsive hair bound 
upon the heads of painted waxen brigands who stared out from 
glass boxes upon the passer-by, with their stony eyes, and 
scared him with the ghostly white of their countenances. We 
shunned these signs for a time, but finally we concluded that 
the wig-makers must of necessity be the barbers as well, 
since we could find no single legitimate representative of the 
fraternity. We entered and asked, and found that it was 
even so. 

I said I wanted to be shaved. The barber inquired where 
my room was. I said, never mind where my room was, I 
wanted to be shaved — there, on the spot. The doctor said he 
would be shaved also. Then there was an excitement among 
those two barbers ! There was a wild consultation, and after- 
wards a hurrying to and fro and a feverish gathering up of 
razors from obscure places and a ransacking for soap. Next 
they took us into a little mean, shabby back room ; they got 
two ordinary sitting-room chairs and placed us in them, with 
our coats on. My old, old dream of bliss vanished into thin 
air! 

I sat bolt upright, silent, sad, and solemn. One of the wig- 
making villains lathered my face for ten terrible minutes and 
finished by plastering a mass of suds into my mouth. I ex- 
pelled the nasty stuff with a strong English expletive and said, 
" Foreigner, beware !" Then this outlaw strapped his razor on 
his boot, hovered over me ominously for six fearful seconds, 
and then swooped down upon me like the genius of destruc- 
tion. The first rake of his razor loosened the very hide from 
my face and lifted me out of the chair. I stormed and raved, 
and the other boys enjoyed it. Their beards are not strong 
and thick. Let us draw the curtain over this harrowing scene. 



A BAKBAROUS ATROCITY. 



115 



Suffice it that I submitted, and went through with the cruel 
infliction of a shave by a French barber ; tears of exquisite 
agony coursed down my cheeks, now and then, but I survived. 
Then the incipient assassin held a basin of water under my 
ehin and slopped its contents over my face, and into my 
bosom, and down the back of my neck, with a mean pretense 
of washing away the soap and blood. He dried my features 




A DECIDED SHAVE. 



with a towel, and was going to comb my hair ; but I asked to 
be excused. I said, with withering irony, that it was sufficient 
to be skinned — I declined to be scalped. 

I went away from there with my handkerchief about my 
face, and never, never, never desired to dream of palatial 
Parisian barber-shops any more. The truth is, as I believe I 
have since found out, that they have no barber shops worthy 
of the name, in Paris — and no barbers, either, for that matter. 
The impostor who does duty as a barber, brings his pans and 



116 ABSURD BILLIARDS. 

napkins and implements of torture to your residence and 
deliberately skins you in your private apartments. Ah, I 
have suffered, suffered, suffered, here in Paris, but never mind 
— the time is coming when I shall have a dark and bloody 
revenge. Some day a Parisian barber will come to my room 
to skin me, and from that day forth, that barber will never be 
heard of more. 

At eleven o'clock we alighted upon a sign which manifestly 
referred to billiards. Joy! We had played billiards in the 
Azores with balls that were not round, and on an ancient 
table that was very little smoother than a brick pavement — 
one of those wretched old things with dead cushions, and with 
(patches in the faded cloth and invisible obstructions that made 
the balls describe the most astonishing and unsuspected angles 
and perform feats in the way of unlooked-for and almost impos- 
sible " scratches," that were perfectly bewildering. We had 
played at Gibraltar with balls the size of a walnut, on a table 
like a public square — and in both instances we achieved far 
more aggravation than amusement. We expected to fare 
better here, but we were mistaken. The cushions were a good 
deal higher than the balls, and as the balls had a fashion of 
always stopping under the cushions, we accomplished very 
little in the way of caroms. The cushions were hard and 
unelastic, and the cues were so crooked that in making a shot 
you had to allow for the curve or you would infallibly put the 
*" English " on the wrong side of the ball. Dan was to mark 
while the doctor and I played. At the end of an hour neither 
of us had made a count, and so Dan was tired of keeping tally 
with nothing to tally, and we were heated and angry and 
disgusted. We paid the heavy bill — about six cents — and 
said we would call around some time when we had a week to 
*pend, and finish the game. 

We adjourned to one of those pretty caf£s and took supper 
and tested the wines of the country, as we had been instructed 
to do, and found them harmless and unexciting. They might 
have been exciting, however, if we had chosen to drink a suffi- 
ciency of them. 



GASTLY EXPERIENCE* 117 

To close our first day in Paris cheerfully and pleasantly, we 
now sought our grand room in the Grand Hotel du Louvre 
and climbed into our sumptuous bed, to read and smoke — but 
alas! 

It was pitiful, 
In a whole city-full, 
Gas we had none. 

No gas to read by — nothing but dismal candles. It was & 
shame. We tried to map out excursions for the morrow ; we 
puzzled over French " Guides to Paris ;" we talked disjointedly, 
in a vain endeavor to make head or tail of the wild chaos of 




A GAS-TLY SUBSTITUTE- 

the day's sights and experiences; we subsided to indolent 
smoking ; we gaped and yawned, and stretched — then feebly 
wondered if we were really and truly in renowned Paris, and 
drifted drowsily away into that vast mysterious void which 
men call sleep. 

* Joke by the Doctor. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE next morning we were up and dressed at ten o'clock. 
We went to the commissionaire of the hotel — I don't 
know what a commissionaire is, but that is the man we went to 
— and told him we wanted a guide. He said the great Inter- 
national Exposition had drawn such multitudes of Englishmen 
and Americans to Paris that it would be next to impossible to 
find a good guide unemployed. He said he usually kept a 
dozen or two on hand, but he only had three now. He called 
them. One looked so like a very pirate that we let him go at 
once. The next one spoke with a simpering precision of pro- 
nunciation that was irritating, and said : 

"If ze zhentlemans will to me make ze grande honneur to 
me rattain in hees serveece, I shall show to him every sing zat 
is magnifique to look upon in ze beautiful Parree. I speaky 
ze Angleesh pairfaitemaw." 

He would have done well to have stopped there, because he 
had that much by heart and said it right off without making 
a mistake. But his self-complacency seduced him into at- 
tempting a flight into regions of unexplored English, and the 
reckless experiment was his ruin. Within ten seconds he was 
so tangled up in a maze of mutilated verbs and torn and 
bleeding forms of speech that no human ingenuity could ever 
have gotten him out of it with credit. It was plain enough 
that he could not " speaky " the English quite as " pairfaite- 
maw " as he had pretended he could. 

The third man captured us. He was plainly dressed, but 
he had a noticeable air of neatness about him. He wore a 



MONSIEUR BILLFINGER. 119 

high silk hat which was a little old, but had been carefully 
brushed. He wore second-hand kid gloves, in good repair, 




THE THREE GUIDES. 



and carried a small rattan cane with a curved handle — a 
female leg, of ivory. He stepped as gently and as daintily as 
a cat crossing a muddy street ; and oh, he was urbanity ; he 
was quiet, unobtrusive self-possession ; he was deference itself! 
He spoke softly and guardedly ; and when he was about to 
make a statement on his sole responsibility, or offer a sugges- 
tion, he weighed it by drachms and scruples first, with the 
crook of his little stick placed meditatively to his teeth. His 
opening speech was perfect. It was perfect in construction, 
in phraseology, in grammar, in emphasis, in pronunciation — 
every thing. He spoke little and guardedly, after that. We 
were charmed. We were more than charmed — we were over- 
joyed. We hired him at once. We never even asked him his 
price. This man — our lackey, our servant, our unquestioning 
slave though he was, was still a gentleman — we could see that 
— while of the other two one was coarse and awkward, and the 
other was a born pirate. We asked our man Friday's name. 
He drew from his pocket-book a snowy little card, and passed 
it to us with a profound bow : 



A. BlLLFINGER, 

Guide to Paris, France, Germany, 
Spain, &c., &c., 

Grande Hotel du Louvre. 



120 RE-CHRISTENING THE FRENCHMAN. 

" Billfinger ! Oh, carry me home to die !" 

That was an " aside " from Dan. The atrocious name grated 
harshly on my ear, too. The most of us can learn to forgive, 
and even to like, a countenance that strikes us unpleasantly 
at first, but few of us, I fancy, become reconciled to a jar- 
ring name so easily. I was almost sorry we had hired this 
man, his name was so unbearable. However, no matter. We 
were impatient to start. Billfinger stepped to the door to call 
a carriage, and then the doctor said : 

" Well, the guide goes with the barber-shop, with the bil- 
liard-table, with the gasless room, and may be with many an- 
other pretty romance of Paris. I expected to have a guide 
named Henri de Montmorency, or Armand de la Chartreuse, 
01 something that would sound grand in letters to the villagers 
at home ; but to think of a Frenchman by the name of Bill- 
finger! Oh! this is absurd, you know. This will never do. 
W e can't say Billfinger ; it is nauseating. Name him over 
again: what had we better call him? Alexis du Caulain- 
court?" 

" Alphonse Henri Gustave de Hauteville," I suggested. 

"Call him Ferguson," said Dan. 

That was practical, unromantic good sense. Without de- 
bate, we expunged Billfinger as Billfinger, and called him Fer- 
guson. 

The carriage — an open barouche — was ready. Ferguson 
mounted beside the driver, and we whirled away to breakfast. 
As was proper, Mr. Ferguson stood by to transmit our orders 
and answer questions. Bye and bye, he mentioned casually — 
the artful adventurer — that he would go and get his breakfast 
as soon as we had finished ours. He knew we could not get 
along without him, and that we would not want to loiter 
about and wait for him. We asked him to sit down and eat 
with us. He begged, with many a bow, to be excused. It 
was not proper, he said ; he would sit at another table. We 
ordered him peremptorily to sit down with us. 

Here endeth the first lesson. It was a mistake. 

As long as we had that fellow after that, he was always 



121 

hungry; he was always thirsty, He came early; he stayed 
late ; he could not pass a restaurant ; he looked with a lecher- 
ous eye upon every wine shop. Suggestions to stop, excuses 
to eat and to drink were forever on his lips. We tried all we 
could to fill him so full that he would have no room to spare 
for a fortnight ; but it was a failure. He did not hold enough 
to smother the cravings of his superhuman appetite. 

He had another " discrepancy " about him. He was always 
wanting us to buy things. On the shallowest pretenses, he 
would inveigle us into shirt stores, boot stores, tailor shops, 
glove shops — any where under the broad sweep of the heavens 
that there seemed a chance of our buying any thing. Any 
one could have guessed that the shopkeepers paid him a per 
centage on the sales ; but in our blessed innocence we didn't, 
until this feature of his conduct grew unbearably prominent. 
One day, Dan happened to mention that he thought of buying 
three or four silk dress patterns for presents. Ferguson's 
hungry eye was upon him in an instant. In the course of 
twenty minutes, the carriage stopped. 

"What's this?" 

" Zis is ze finest silk magazin in Paris — ze most cele- 
brate." 

" What did you come here for ? We told you to take us to 
the palace of the Louvre." 

" I suppose ze gentleman say he wish to buy some silk." 

" You are not required to ' suppose ' things for the party, 
Ferguson. We do not wish to tax your energies too much. 
We will bear some of the burden and heat of the day our- 
selves. We will endeavor to do such ' supposing ' as is really 
necessary to be done. Drive on." So spake the doctor. 

Within fifteen minutes the carriage halted again, and before 
another silk store. The doctor said : 

"Ah, the palace of the Louvre : beautiful, beautiful edifice! 
Does the Emperor Napoleon live here now, Ferguson ?" 

" Ah, doctor ! you do jest ; zis is not ze palace ; we come 
there directly. But since we pass right by zis store, where is 
such beautiful silk — " 



122 



SOLD. 



" Ah ! I see, I see. I meant to have told you that we did 
not wish to purchase any silks to-day; but in my absent- 
mindedness I forgot it. I also meant to tell you we 
wished to go directly to the Louvre ; but I forgot that also. 
However, we will go there now. Pardon my seeming care- 
lessness, Ferguson. Drive on." 

Within the half hour, we stopped again — in front of another 
silk store. We were angry ; but the doctor was always serene, 
always smooth-voiced. He said : 

" At last! How imposing the Louvre is, and yet how 
small ! how exquisitely fashioned ! how charmingly situated ! 
— "Venerable, venerable pile — " 

" Pairdon, doctor, zis is not ze Louvre — it is — " 

" What is it 1" 

" I have ze idea — it come to me in a moment — zat ze silk in 
zis magazin — " 




"ze silk magazin. 



" Ferguson, how heedless I am. I fully intended to tell j-qu 



123 

that we did not wish to buy any silks to-day, and I also in- 
tended to tell you that we yearned to go immediately to the 
palace of the Louvre, but enjoying the happiness of seeing you 
devour four breakfasts this morning has so filled me with 
pleasurable emotions that I neglect the commonest interests 
of the time. However, we will proceed now to the Louvre, 
Ferguson." 

" But doctor," (excitedly,) " it will take not a minute — not 
but one small minute ! Ze gentleman need not to buy if he 
not wish to — but only look at ze silk — look at ze beautiful 
fabric." [Then pleadingly.] " Sair — just only one leetle mo- 
ment !" 

Dan said, " Confound the idiot ! I don't want to see any 
silks to-day, and I wonH look at them. Drive on." 

And the doctor : " We need no silks now, Ferguson. Our 
hearts yearn for the Louvre. Let us journey on — let us jour- 
ney on." 

"But doctor! it is only one moment — one leetle moment. 
And ze time will be save— entirely save! Because zere is 
nothing to see, now — it is too late. It want ten minute to 
four and ze Louvre close at four — only one leetle moment, doc- 
tor!" 

The treacherous miscreant! After four breakfasts and a 
gallon of champagne, to serve us such a scurvy trick. We 
got no sight of the countless treasures of art in the Louvre 
galleries that day, and our only poor little satisfaction was in 
the reflection that Ferguson sold not a solitary silk dress pat- 
tern. 

I am writing this chapter partly for the satisfaction of abus- 
ing that accomplished knave, Billfinger, and partly to show 
whosoever shall read this how Americans fare at the hands of 
the Paris guides, and what sort of people Paris guides are. 
It need not be supposed that we were a stupider or an easier 
prey than our countrymen generally are, for we were not. 
The guides deceive and defraud every American who goes to 
Paris for the first time and sees its sights alone or in company 
with others as little experienced as himself. I shall visit 



124 



THE INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION. 



Paris again some day, and then let the guides beware! I 
shall go in my war-paint — I shall carry my tomahawk along. 
I think we have lost but little time in Paris. We have 

gone to bed every night tired 
out. Of course we visited the 
renowned International Ex- 
position. All the world did 
that. We went there on our 
third day in Paris — and we 
stayed there nearly two hours. 
That was our first and last visit. 
To tell the truth, we saw at a 
glance that one would have to 
spend weeks — yea, even months 
— in that monstrous establish- 
ment, to get an intelligible idea 
of it. It was a wonderful 
show, but the moving masses 
of people of all nations we 
saw there were a still more 
wonderful show. I discovered 
that if I were to stay there a 
month, I should still find my- 
self looking at the people in- 
stead of the inanimate objects 
on exhibition. I got a little interested in some curious old 
tapestries of the thirteenth century, but a party of Arabs 
came by, and their dusky faces and quaint costumes called my 
attention away at once. I watched a silver swan, which had 
a living grace about his movements, and a living intelligence 
in his eyes — watched him swimming about as comfortably and 
as unconcernedly as if he had been born in a morass instead 
of a jeweller's shop — watched him seize a silver fish from 
under the water and hold up his head and go through all the 
customary and elaborate motions of swallowing it — but the 
moment it disappeared down his throat some tattooed South 
Sea Islanders approached and I yielded to their attractions. 




RETURN IN WAR-PAINT. 



FINE MILITARY REYIEW. 125 

Presently I found a revolving pistol several hundred years 
old which looked strangely like a modern Colt, but just then 
I heard that the Empress of the French was in another part 
of the building, and hastened away to see what she might 
look like. We heard martial music — we saw an unusual 
number of soldiers walking hurriedly about — there was a 
general movement among the people. We inquired what it 
was all about, and learned that the Emperor of the French 
and the Sultan of Turkey were about to review twenty-fivt 
thousand troops at the Arc de TEtoile. We immediately de- 
parted. I had a greater anxiety to see these men than I could 
have had to see twenty Expositions. 

We drove away and took up a position in an open space 
opposite the American Minister's house. A speculator bridged 
a couple of barrels with a board and we hired standing-places 
on it. Presently there was a sound of distant music ; in an- 
other minute a pillar of dust came moving slowly toward us ; 
a moment more, and then, with colors flying and a grand 
crash of military music, a gallant array of cavalrymen 
emerged from the dust and came down the street on a gentle 
trot. After them came a long line of artillery ; then more 
cavalry, in splendid uniforms; and then their Imperial Ma- 
jesties Napoleon III. and Abdul Aziz. The vast concourse 
of people swung their hats and shouted — the windows and 
house-tops in the wide vicinity burst into a snow-storm of 
waving handkerchiefs, and the wavers of the same mingled 
their cheers with those of the masses below. It was a stirring 
spectacle. 

But the two central figures claimed all my attention. Was 
ever such a contrast set up before a multitude till then ? Na- 
poleon, in military uniform — a long-bodied, short-legged man, 
fiercely moustached, old, wrinkled, with eyes half closed, and 
such a deep, crafty, scheming expression about them ! — Na- 
poleon, bowing ever so gently to the loud plaudits, and watch- 
ing every thing and every body with his cat-eyes from under 
his depressed hat-brim, as if to discover any sign that those 
cheers were not heartfelt and cordial. 



126 



NAPOLEON III. 




NAPOLEON III. 



Abdul Aziz, absolute lord of the Ottoman Empire, — 

clad in dark green 
European clothes, 
almost without or- 
nament or insignia 
of rank; a red 
Turkish fez on his 
head — a short, stout, 
dark man, black- 
bearded, black- 
eyed, stupid, unpre- 
possessing — a man 
whose whole ap- 
pearance somehow 
suggested that if he 
only had a cleaver 
in his hand and a 
white apron on, one 
would not be at all surprised to hear him say : " A mutton- 
roast to-day, or will 
you have a nice 
porter-house steak ?" 
Napoleon III., 
the representative 
of the highest mod- 
ern civilization, pro- 
gress, and refine- 
ment; Abdul- Aziz, 
the representative 
of a people by na- 
ture and training 
filthy, brutish, ig- 
norant, unprogress- 
ive, superstitious — 
and a government 
whose Three Graces 




ABDUL AZIZ. 



are 



Tyranny, Eapacity, Blood. Here in brilliant Paris, under 



NAPOLEON III. 127 

tkis majestic Arch of Triumph, the First Century greets the 
Nineteenth ! 

Napoleon III., Emperor of France ! Surrounded by shout- 
ing thousands, by military pomp, by the splendors of his 
capital city, and companioned by kings and princes — this is 
the man who was sneered at, and reviled, and called Bastard 
— yet who was dreaming of a crown and an Empire all the 
while; who was driven into exile — but carried his dreams 
with him ; who associated with the common herd in America, 
and ran foot-races for a wager — but still sat upon a throne, in 
fancy ; who braved every danger to go to his dying mother — 
and grieved that she could not be spared to see him cast aside 
kis plebeian vestments for the purple of royalty ; who kept 
his faithful watch and walked his weary beat a common po- 
liceman of London — but dreamed the while of a coming 
night when he should tread the long-drawn corridors of the 
Tuileries ; who made the miserable fiasco of Strasbourg ; saw 
his poor, shabby eagle, forgetful of its lesson, refuse to perch 
upon his shoulder; delivered his carefully-prepared, senten- 
tious burst of eloquence, upon unsympathetic ears ; found him- 
self a prisoner, the butt of small wits, a mark for the pitiless 
ridicule of all the world — yet went on dreaming of corona- 
tions and splendid pageants as before; who lay a forgotten 
captive in the dungeons of Ham — and still schemed and 
planned and pondered over future glory and future power; 
President of France at last ! a coup oVelat, and surrounded by 
applauding armies, welcomed by the thunders of cannon, he 
mounts a throne and waves before an astounded world the 
sceptre of a mighty Empire ! Who talks of the marvels of 
fiction? Who speaks of the wonders of romance? Who 
prates of the tame achievements of Aladdin and the Magii of 
Arabia ? 

Abdul- Aziz, Sultan of Turkey, Lord of the Ottoman Em- 
pire! Born to a throne: weak, stupid, ignorant, almost, as 
his meanest slave ; chief of a vast royalty, yet the puppet of 
his Premier and the obedient child of a tyrannical mother; a 
man who sits upon a throne — the beck of whose finger moves 



128 THE SULTAN OF TURKEY. 

navies and armies — who holds in his hands the power of life 
and death over millions — yet who sleeps, sleeps, eats, eats, 
idles with his eight hundred concubines, and when he is sur- 
feited with eating and sleeping and idling, and would rouse 
up and take the reins of government and threaten to be a Sul- 
tan, is charmed from his purpose by wary Fuad Pacha with a 
pretty plan for a new palace or a new ship — charmed away 
with a new toy, like any other restless child ; a man who sees 
his people robbed and oppressed by soulless tax-gatherers, but 
speaks no word to save them ; who believes in gnomes, and 
genii and the wild fables of the Arabian Nights, but has 
small regard for the mighty magicians of to-day, and is ner- 
vous in the presence of their mysterious railroads and steam- 
boats and telegraphs ; who would see undone in Egypt all 
that great Mehemet Ali achieved, and would prefer rather to 
forget than emulate him ; a man who found his great Empire a 
blot upon the earth — a degraded, poverty-stricken, miserable, 
infamous agglomeration of ignorance, crime, and brutality, 
and will idle away the allotted days of his trivial life, and then 
pass to the dust and the worms and leave it so ! 

Napoleon has augmented the commercial prosperity of 
France, in ten years, to such a degree that figures can hardly 
compute it. He has rebuilt Paris, and has partly rebuilt 
every city in the State. He condemns a whole street at a 
time, assesses the damages, pays them and rebuilds superbly. 
Then speculators buy up the ground and sell, but the original 
owner is given the first choice by the government at a stated 
price before the speculator is permitted to purchase. But 
above all things, he has taken the sole control of the Empire 
of France into his hands, and made it a tolerably free land — 
for people who will not attempt to go too far in medding with 
government affairs. No country offers greater security to life 
and property than France, and one has all the freedom he 
wants, but no license — no license to interfere with any body, 
or make any one uncomfortable. 

As for the Sultan, one could set a trap any where and catch 
a dozen abler men in a night. 



THE REVIEW. — CANROBERT 



129 



The bands struck up, and the brilliant adventurer, Napo- 
leon III. 5 the genius of Energy, Persistence, Enterprise ; and 
the feeble Abdul- Aziz, the genius of Ignorance, Bigotry and 
Indolence, prepared for the Forward — March ! 

We saw the splendid review, we saw the white-moustached 
old Crimean soldier, Canrobert, Marshal of France, we saw — 
well, we saw every thing, and then we went home satisfied. 




CHAPTEE XIT. 

"TTTE went to see the Cathedral of Notre Dame. — We had 
▼ V heard of it before. It surprises me, sometimes, to 
think how much we do knov, and how intelligent we are. 
"We recognized the brown old Gothic pile in a moment ; it was 
like the pictures. We stood at a little distance and changed 
from one point of observation to another, and gazed long at 
its lofty square towers and its rich front, clustered thick with 
stony, mutilated saints who had been looking calmly down 
from their perches for ages. The Patriarch of Jerusalem stood 
under them in the old days of chivalry and romance, and 
preached the third Crusade, more than six hundred years ago ; 
and since that day they have stood there and looked quietly 
down upon the most thrilling scenes, the grandest pageants, 
the most extraordinary spectacles that have grieved or de- 
lighted Paris. These battered and broken-nosed old fellows 
saw many and many a cavalcade of mail-clad knights come 
marching- home from Holy Land ; they heard the bells above 
them toll the signal for the St. Bartholomew's Massacre, and 
the;\ saw the slaughter that followed; later, they saw the 
Reign Sf Terror, the carnage of the Revolution, the overthrow 
of a king*, the coronation ot two Napoleons, the ihristening of 
the young prince that lords it over a regiment of servants in 
the Tuileries to-day — and they may possibly continue to stand 
there until they see the Napoleon dynasty swept away and the 
banners of a great Republic floating above its ruins. I wish 
these old parties could speak. They could tell a tale worth 
the listening to. 

They say that a pagan temple stood where Notre Dame now 



ADDITIOr. 181 

stands, in the old Eoman days, eighteen or twenty centuries 
ago — remains of it are still preserved in Paris ; and that a 
Christian church took its place about A. D. 300 ; another took 
the place of that in A. D. 500 ; and that the foundations of the 
present Cathedral were laid about A. D. 1100. The ground 
ought to be measurably sacred by this time, one would think. 
One portion of this noble old edifice is suggestive of the quaint 
fashions of ancient times. It was built by Jean Sans-Peur, 
Duke of Burgundy, to set his conscience at rest — he had as- 
sassinated the Duke of Orleans. Alas ! those good old times 
are gone, when a murderer could wipe the stain from his name 
and soothe his troubles to sleep simply by getting out his bricks 
and mortar and building an addition to a church. 

The portals of the great western front are bisected by square 
pillars. They took the central one away, in 1852, on the oc- 
casion of thanksgivings for the reinstitution of the Presiden- 
tial power — but precious soon they had occasion to reconsider 
that motion and put it back again ! And they did. 

"We loitered through the grand aisles for an hour or two, 
staring up at the rich stained glass windows embellished with 
blue and yellow and crimson saints and martyrs, and trying 
to admire the numberless great pictures in the chapels, and 
then we were admitted to the sacristy and shown the magnifi- 
«jent robes which the Pope wore when he crowned Napoleon 
I.; a wagon-load of solid gold and silver utensils used in the 
great public processions and ceremonies of the church ; some 
nails of the true cross, a fragment of the cross itself, a part of 
the crown of thorns. We had already seen a large piece of the 
true cross in a church in the Azores, but no nails. They 
showed us likewise the bloody robe which that Archbishop of 
Paris wore who exposed his sacred person and braved the 
wrath of the insurgents of 1848, to mount the barricades and 
hold aloft the olive branch of peace in the hope of stopping 
the slaughter. His noble effort cost him his life. He was 
shot dead. They showed us a cast of his face, taken after 
death, the bullet that killed him, and the two vertebra in 
which it lodged. These people have a somewhat singular 



132 



THE MORGUE. 



taste in the matter of relics. Ferguson told us that the 
silver cross which the good Archbishop wore at his girdle was 
seized and thrown into the Seine, where it lay embedded in 
the mud for fifteen years, and then an angel appeared to a 
priest and told him where to dive for it ; he did dive for it and 
got it, and now it is there on exhibition at Notre Dame, to be 
inspected by any body who feels an interest in inanimate ob- 
jects of miraculous intervention. 




Next we went 
to visit the 
Morgue, that 
horrible recep- 
tacle for the 
dead who die 
mysteriously 
and leave the 
manner of their 
taking off a 
dismal secret. 
We stood be- 
fore a grating 
and looked 
through into a room which was hung all about with the 
clothing of dead men ; coarse blouses, water-soaked ; the deli- 
cate garments of women and children ; patrician vestments, 



THE MORGUE. 



THE MORGUE. 1SS 

hacked and stabbed and stained with red; a hat that was 
crushed and bloody. On a slanting stone lay a drowned 
man, naked, swollen, purple ; clasping the fragment of a bro- 
ken bush with a grip which death had so petrified that human 
strength could not unloose it — mute witness of the last despair- 
ing effort to save the life that was doomed beyond all help. A 
stream of water trickled ceaselessly over the hideous face. We 
knew that the body and the clothing were there for identifica- 
tion by friends, but still we wondered if any body could love that 
repulsive object or grieve for its loss. We grew medita- 
tive and wondered if, some forty years ago, when the mother 
of that ghastly thing was dandling it upon her knee, and kiss- 
ing it and petting it and displaying it with satisfied pride to- 
the passers-by, a prophetic vision of this dread ending ever 
flitted through her brain. I half feared that the mother, or the 
wife or a brother of the dead man might come while we stood 
there, but nothing of the kind occurred. Men and women 
came, and some looked eagerly in, and pressed their faces 
against the bars ; others glanced carelessly at the body, and 
turned away with a disappointed look — people, I thought, who 
live upon strong excitements, and who attend the exhibitions 
of the Morgue regularly, just as other people go to see thea- 
trical spectacles every night. When one of these looked in and 
passed on, I could not help thinking — 

" JS"ow this don't afford you any satisfaction — a party with 
his head shot off is what you need." 

One night we went to the celebrated Jar din Mabille, but 
only staid a little while. We wanted to see some of this kind 
of Paris life, however, and therefore, the next night we went 
to a similar place of entertainment in a great garden in the 
suburb of Asnieres. We went to the railroad depot, toward 
evening, and Ferguson got tickets for a second-class carriage. 
Such a perfect jam of people I have not often seen — but there 
was no noise, no disorder, no rowdyism. Some of the women 
and young girls that entered the train we knew to be of the 
demi-monde, but others we were not at all sure about. 

The girls and women in our carriage behaved themselves 



134 Balaam's friend speaks. 

modestly and becomingly, all the way out, except that they 
smoked. When we arrived at the garden in Asnie>es, we paid 
a franc or two admission, and entered a place which had flow- 
er-beds in it, and grass plats, and long, curving rows of orna- 
mental shrubbery, with here and there a secluded bower con- 
venient for eating ice-cream in. We moved along the sinuous 
gravel walks, with the great concourse of girls and young men, 
and suddenly a domed and filagreed white temple, starred 
over and over and over again with brilliant gas-jets, burst upon 
us like a fallen sun. Near by was a large, handsome house 
with its ample front illuminated in the same way, and above 
its roof floated the Star Spangled Banner of America. 

" Well !" I said. " How is this ?" It nearly took my breath 
away. 

Ferguson said an American — a New Yorker — kept the 
place, and was carrying on quite a stirring opposition to the 
Jardin Mabille. 

Crowds, composed of both sexes and nearly all ages, were 
frisking about the garden or sitting in the open air in front of 
the flag-staff and the temple, drinking wine and coffee, or 
smoking. The dancing had not begun, yet. Ferguson said 
there was to be an exhibition. The famous Blondin was going 
to perform on a tight-rope in another part of the garden. We 
went thither. Here the light was dim, and the masses of peo- 
ple were pretty closely packed together. And now I made a 
mistake which any donkey might make, but a sensible man 
never. I committed an error which I find myself repeating 
every day of my life. — Standing right before a young lady, I 
•aid — 

" Dan, just look at this girl, how beautiful she is !" 

" I thank you more for the evident sincerity of the compli- 
ment, sir. than for the extraordinary publicity you have givea 
to it !" This in good, pure English. 

We took a walk, but my spirits were very, very sadly damp- 
ened. I did not feel right comfortable for some time after- 
ward. Why will people be so stupid as to suppose themselves 
the only foreigners among a crowd of ten thousand persons t 



BLONDIN IN A FLAME 



135 



But Blondin came out shortly. He appeared on a stretched 
cable, far away above the sea of tossing hats and handker- 
chiefs, and in the glare of the hundreds of rockets that whizzed 
heavenward by him he looked like a wee insect. He balanced 




WE TOOK A WALK. 



his pole and walked the length of his rope — two or three hun- 
dred feet; he came back and got a man and carried him 
across ; he returned to the centre and danced a jig ; next he 
performed some gymnastic and balancing feats too perilous to 
afford a pleasant spectacle ; and he finished by fastening to his 
person a thousand Roman candles, Catherine wheels, serpentft 
and rockets of all manner of brilliant colors, setting them on 
fire all at once and walking and waltzing across his rope again, 
in a blinding blaze of glory that lit up the garden and the 
people's faces like a great conflagration at midnight. 

The dance had begun, and we adjourned to the temple. 
Within it was a drinking saloon ; and all around it was a 



156 



THE OUTRAGEOUS 



broad circular platform for the dancers. I backed up against 
the wall of the temple, and waited. Twenty sets formed, the 
music struck up, and then — I placed my hands before my face 
for very shame. But I looked through my fingers. They 

were dancing the renowned " Can- 
can" A handsome girl in the 
set before me tripped forward 
lightly to meet the opposite gen- 
tleman — tripped back again, 
grasped her dresses vigorously 
on both sides with her hands, 
raised them pretty high, danced 
an extraordinary jig that had 
more activity and exposure about 
it than any jig I ever saw before, 
and then, drawing her clothes 
still higher, she advanced gaily 
to the centre and launched a vi- 
cious kick full at her vis-a-vis that 
must infallibly have removed his 
nose if he had been seven feet 
high. It was a mercy he was 
only six. 

That is the can-can. The idea 
of it is to dance as wildly, as 
noisily, as furiously as you can ; 
expose yourself as much as possible if you are a woman ; and 
kick as high as you can, no matter which sex you belong to. 
There is no word of exaggeration in this. Any of the staid, 
respectable, aged people who were there that night can testify 
to the truth of that statement. There were a good many such 
people present. I suppose French morality is not of that 
straight-laced description which is shocked at trifles. 

I moved aside and took a general view of the can-can. 
Shouts, laughter, furious music, a bewildering chaos of darting 
and intermingling forms, stormy jerking and snatching of gay 
dresses, bobbing heads, flying arms, lightning-flashes of white' 




CAN-CAN. 



THE LOWER PALACE. 137 

stockinged calves and dainty slippers in the air, and then a 
grand final rush, riot, a terrific hubbub and a wild stampede ! 
Heavens ! Nothing like it has been seen on earth since 
trembling Tarn O'Shanter saw the devil and the witches at 
their orgies that stormy night in " Allow ay's auld haunted 
kirk." 

We visited the Louvre, at a time when we had no silk pur- 
chases in view, and looked at its miles of paintings by the old 
masters. Some of them were beautiful, but at the same time 
they carried such evidences about them of the cringing spirit 
of those great men that we found small pleasure in examining 
them. Their nauseous adulation of princely patrons was more 
prominent to me and chained my attention more surely than 
the charms of color and expression which are claimed to be 
in the pictures. Gratitude for kindnesses is well, but it seems 
to me that some of those artists carried it so far that it ceased 
to be gratitude, and became worship. If there is a plausible 
excuse for the worship of men, then by all means let us forgive 
Rubens and his brethren. 

But I will drop the subject, lest I say something about the 
©Id masters that might as well be left unsaid. 

Of course we drove in the Bois de Boulogne, that limitless 
park, with its forests, its lakes, its cascades, and its broad ave- 
nues. There were thousands upon thousands of vehicles 
abroad, and the scene was full of life and gayety. There were 
very common hacks, with father and mother and all the chil- 
dren in them; conspicuous little open carriages with celebrated 
ladies of questionable reputation in them ; there were Dukes and 
Duchesses abroad, with gorgeous footmen perched behind, and 
equally gorgeous outriders perched on each of the six horses ; 
there were blue and silver, and green and gold, and pink and 
black, and all sorts and descriptions of stunning and startling 
liveries out, and I almost yearned to be a flunkey myself, for 
the sake of the fine clothes. 

But presently the Emperor came along and he out-shone 
them all. He was preceded by a body guard of gentlemen on 
horseback in showy uniforms, his carriage-horses (there ap- 



138 RESERVATION OF NOTED THINGS. 

peared to be somewhere in the remote neighborhood of a thou- 
sand of them,) were bestridden by gallant looking fellows, also 
in stylish uniforms, and after the carriage followed another de- 
tachment of body-guards. Every body got out of the way; 
every body bowed to the Emperor and his friend the Sultan, 
and they went by on a swinging trot and disappeared. 

I will not describe the Bois de Boulogne. I can not do it. 1 
It is simply a beautiful, cultivated, endless, wonderful wilder-* 
ness. It is an enchanting place. It is in Paris, now, one may 
say, but a crumbling old cross in one portion of it reminds one 
that it was not always so. The cross marks the spot where a 
celebrated troubadour was waylaid aiid murdered in the four- 
teenth century. It was in this park that that fellow with an 
unpronounceable name made the attempt upon the Russian 
Czar's life last spring with a pistol. The bullet struck a tree. 
Ferguson showed us the place. JSTow in America that inter- 
esting tree would be chopped down or forgotten within the 
next live years, but it will be treasured here. The guides will 
point it out to visitors for the next eight hundred years, and 
when it decays and falls down they will put up another there 
•nd go on with the same old story just the same. 



CHAPTEK XT. 



OWE of our pleasantest visits was to Pere la Chaise, the 
national burying-ground of France, the honored resting- 
place of some of her greatest and best children, the last home 
©f scores of illustrious men and women who were born to n» 
titles, but achieved fame by their own energy and their own 
genius. It is a solemn city of winding streets, and of minia- 
ture marble temples and mansions of the dead gleaming white 
from out a wilderness of foliage and fresh flowers. Not every 
city is so well peopled as this, or has so ample an area within 
its walls. Few palaces exist in any city, that are so exquisite 
in design, so rich in art, so costly in material, so graceful, so 
beautiful. 

We had stood in the ancient church of St. Denis, where 
the marble effigies of thirty generations of kings and queens 
lay stretched at length upon the tombs, and the sensations 
invoked were startling and novel ; the curious armor, the ob- 
solete costumes, the placid faces, the hands placed palm to 
palm in eloquent supplication — it was a vision of gray anti- 
quity. It seemed curious enough to be standing face to face, as 
it were, with old Dagobert L, and Clovis and Charlemagne, 
those vague, colossal heroes, those shadows, those myths of a 
thousand years ago ! I touched their dust-covered faces with 
my finger, but Dagobert was deader than the sixteen centu- 
ries that have passed over him, Clovis slept well after his 
labor for Christ, and old Charlemagne went on dreaming of 
his paladins, of bloody Roncesvalles, and gave no heed to 



140 AMONG THE GREAT DEAD. 

The great names of Pere la Chaise impress one, too, but 
differently. There the suggestion brought constantly to his 
mind is, that this place is sacred to a nobler royalty — the roy- 
alty of heart and brain. Every faculty of mind, every noble 
trait of human nature, every high occupation which men 
engage in seems represented by a famous name. The effect is 
a curious medley. Davoust and Massena, who wrought in 
many a battle-tragedy, are here, and so also is Bachel, of equal 
renown in mimic tragedy on the stage. The Abbe" Sicard 
sleeps here — the first great teacher of the deaf and dumb — a 
man whose heart went out to every unfortunate, and whose 
life was given to kindly offices in their service ; and not far 
off, in repose and peace at last, lies Marshal Ney, whose 
stormy spirit knew no music like the bugle call to arms. The 
man who originated public gas-lighting, and that other bene- 
factor who introduced the cultivation of the potato and thus 
blessed millions of his starving countrymen, lie With the 
Prince of Masserano, and with exiled queens and princes of 
Further India. Gay-Lussac the chemist, Laplace the astron- 
omer, Larrey the surgeon, de S6ze the advocate, are here, and 
with them are Talma, Bellini, Rubini ; de Balzac, Beaumar- 
chais, Beranger ; Moliere and Lafontaine, and scores of other 
men whose names and whose worthy labors are as familiar in 
the remote by-places of civilization as are the historic deeds 
of the kings and princes that sleep in the marble vaults of St. 
Denis. 

But among the thousands and thousands of tombs in Pere 
la Chaise, there is one that no man, no woman, no youth of 
either sex, ever passes by without stopping to examine. 
Every visitor has a sort of indistinct idea of the history of its 
dead, and comprehends that homage is due there, but not one 
in twenty thousand clearly remembers the story of that tomb 
and its romantic occupants. This is the grave of Abelard 
and Heloise — a grave which has been more revered, more 
widely known, more written and sung about and wept over, 
for seven hundred years, than any other in Christendom, save 
only that of the Saviour. All visitors linger pensively about 



THE SHRINE OF DISAPPOINTED LOYE, 



141 



it; all young people capture and carry away keepsakes and 
mementoes of it ; all Parisian youths and maidens who are 
disappointed in love come there to bail out when they are full 
of tears ; yea, many stricken lovers make pilgrimages to this 
shrine from distant provinces to weep and wail and "grit" 
their teeth over their heavy sorrows, and to purchase the sym- 
pathies ot the chastened spirits of that tomb with offerings of 
immortelles and budding flowers. 

Go when you will, you find somebody snuffling over that 
tomb. Go when you will, you find it furnished with those 




GRAVE OF ABELARD AND HELOISE. 



bouquets and immortelles. Go when you will, you find a 
gravel-train from Marseilles arriving to supply the deficiencies 
caused by memento-cabbaging vandals whose affections have 
miscarried. 

Yet who really knows the story of Abelard and Heloise ? 
Precious few people. The names are perfectly familiar to 
every body, and that is about all. With infinite pains I have 
acquired a knowledge of that history, and I propose to narrate 
it here, partly for the honest information of the public and 
partly to show that public that they have been wasting a good 
deal of marketable sentiment very unnecessarily. 



STORY OF ABELARD A1TD HELOISE. 

Heloise was born seven hundred and sixty-six years ago. 



142 THE STORY OF ABELARD AND HELOISE. 



She may have had parents. There is no telling. She lived 
with her uncle Fulbert, a canon of the cathedral of Paris. I 
do not know what a canon of a cathedral is, but that is what 
he was. He was nothing more than a sort of a mountain how- 
itzer, likely, because they had no heavy artillery in those days. 
Suffice it, then, that Heloise lived with her uncle the howitzer, 

and was happy. — She 
spent the most of her 
childhood in the con- 
vent of Argenteuil — 
never heard of Ar- 
genteuil before, but 
suppose there was 
really such a place. 
She then returned to 
her uncle, the old 
gun, or son of a gun, 
as the case may be, 
and he taught her to 
write and speak Lat- 
in, which was the 




A PAIR OF CANONS, 13TH CENTURY. 



language of literature and polite society at that period. 

Just at this time, Pierre Abelard, who had already made 
himself widely famous as a rhetorician, came to found a school 
of rhetoric in Paris. The originality of his principles, his 
eloquence, and his great physical strength and beauty created 
a profound sensation. He saw Heloise, and was captivated by 
her blooming youth, her beauty and her charming disposition. 
He wrote to her ; she answered. He wrote again, she answered 
again. He was now in love. He longed to know her — to 
speak to her face to face. 

His school was near Fulbert's house. He asked Fulbert to 
allow him to call. The good old swivel saw here a rare op- 
portunity : his niece, whom he so much loved, would absorb 
knowledge from this man, and it would not cost him a cent. 
Such was Fulbert — penurious. 

Fulbert's first name is not mentioned by any author, which 



VILLAINY. 148 

i« unfortunate. However, George "W. Fulbert will answer for 
him as well as any other. "We will let him go at that. He 
asked Abelard to teach her. 

Abelard was glad enough of the opportunity. He came 
often and staid long. A letter of his shows in its very first 
sentence that he came under that friendly roof like a cold- 
hearted villain as he was, with the deliberate intention of 
debauching a confiding, innocent girl. This is the letter : 

" I can not cease to be astonished at the simplicity of Fulbert ; I was as muck 
surprised as if he had placed a lamb in the power of a hungry wolf. Heloise and 
I, under pretext of study, gave ourselves up wholly to love, and the solitude that 
love seeks our studies procured for us. Books were open before us, but we spoke 
©ftener of love than philosophy, and kisses came more readily from our lips than 
words." 

And so, exulting over an honorable confidence which to his 
degraded instinct was a ludicrous " simplicity," this unmanly 
Abelard seduced the niece of the man whose guest he was. 
Paris found it out. Fulbert was told of it — told often — but 
refused to believe it. He could not comprehend how a man 
could be so depraved as to use the sacred protection and 
security of hospitality as a means for the commission of such 
a crime as that. But when he heard the rowdies in the streets 
singing the love-songs of Abelard to Heloise, the case was too 
plain — love-songs come not properly within the teachings of 
rhetoric and philosophy. 

He drove Abelard from his house. Abelard returned 
secretly and carried Heloise away to Palais, in Brittany, his 
native country. Here, shortly afterward, she bore a son, who, 
from his rare beauty, was surnamed Astrolabe — William G. 
The girl's flight enraged Fulbert, and he longed for vengeance, 
but feared to strike lest retaliation visit Heloise — for he still 
loved her tenderly. At length Abelard offered to marry 
Heloise — but on a shameful condition : that the marriage 
should be kept secret from the world, to the end that (while 
her good name remained a wreck, as before,) his priestly repu- 
tation might be kept untarnished. It was like that miscreant. 
Fulbert saw his opportunity and consented. He would see 



144 



THE MARRIAGE. 



the parties married, and then violate the confidence of the 
man who had taught him that trick ; he would divulge the 
secret and so remove somewhat of the obloquy that attached 
to his niece's fame. But the niece suspected his scheme. She 
refused the marriage, at first ; she said Fulbert would betray 
the secret to save her, and besides, she did not wish to drag 
down a lover who was so gifted, so honored by the world, and 
who had such a splendid career before him. It was noble, 
self-sacrificing love, and characteristic of the pure-souled 
Heloise, but it was not good sense. 

But she was overruled, and the private marriage took place. 
Now for Fulbert ! The heart so wounded should be healed at 




THE PRIVATE MARRIAGE. 



last ; the proud spirit so tortured should find rest again ; the 
humbled head should be lifted up once more. He pro- 
claimed the marriage in the high places of the city, and re- 
joiced that dishonor had departed from his house. But lo ! 
Abelard denied the marriage ! Heloise denied it ! The 
people, knowing the former circumstances, might have be- 
lieved Fulbert, had only Abelard denied it, but when the per- 
son chiefly interested — the girl herself — denied it, they laughed 
despairing Fulbert to scorn. 



LOVE AND INDIFFERENCE. 146 

The poor canon of the cathedral of Paris was spiked again. 
The last hope of repairing the wrong that had been done his 
house was gone. What next ? Human nature suggested re- 
venge. He compassed it. The historian says : 

11 Ruffians, hired by Fulbert, fell upon Abelard by night, and inflicted upoa him 
a terrible and nameless mutilation." 

I am seeking the last resting-place of those "ruffians." 
When I find it I shall shed some tears on it, and stack up 
some bouquets and immortelles, and cart away from it some 
gravel whereby to remember that howsoever blotted by 
crime their lives may have been, these ruffians did one just 
deed, at any rate, albeit it was not warranted by the strict 
letter of the law. 

Heloise entered a convent and gave good-bye to the world 
and its pleasures for all time. For twelve years she never 
heard of Abelard — never even heard his name mentioned. 
She had become prioress of Argenteuil, and led a life of com- 
plete seclusion. She happened one day to see a letter written 
by him, in which he narrated his own history. She cried over 
it, and wrote him. He answered, addressing her as his " sis- 
ter in Christ." They continued to correspond, she in the un- 
weighed language of unwavering affection, he in the chilly 
phraseology of the polished rhetorician. She poured out her 
heart in passionate, disjointed sentences ; he replied with 
finished essays, divided deliberately into heads and sub-heads, 
premises and argument. She showered upon him the tender- 
est epithets that love could devise, he addressed her from the 
North Pole of his frozen heart as the " Spouse of Christ !" 
The abandoned villain ! 

On account of her too easy government of her nuns, some 
disreputable irregularities were discovered among them, and 
the Abbot of St. Denis broke up her establishment. Abelard 
was the official head of the monastery of St. Grildas de Ruys, 
at that time, and when he heard of her homeless condition a 
sentiment of pity was aroused in his breast (it is a wonder the 
unfamiliar emotion did not blow his head off,) and he placed 

10 



146 RETRIBUTION. 

ker and her troop in the little oratory of the Paraclete, a re- 
ligious establishment which he had founded. She had many 
privations and sufferings to undergo at first, but her worth 
and her gentle disposition won influential friends for her, and 
she built up a wealthy and flourishing nunnery. She became 
a great favorite with the heads of the church, and also the 
people, though she seldom appeared in public. She rapidly 
advanced in esteem, in good report and in usefulness, and 
Abelard as rapidly lost ground. The Pope so honored her 
that he made her the head of her order. Abelard, a man of 
splendid talents, and ranking as the first debater of his time, 
became timid, irresolute, and distrustful of his powers. He 
only needed a great misfortune to topple him from the high 
position he held in the world of intellectual excellence, and it 
came. Urged by kings and princes to meet the subtle St. 
Bernard in debate and crush him, he stood up in the presence 
of a royal and illustrious assemblage, and when his antagonist 
had finished he looked about him, and stammered a com- 
mencement ; but his courage failed him, the cunning of his 
tongue was gone : with his speech unspoken, he trembled and 
gat down, a disgraced and vanquished champion. 

He died a nobody, and was buried at Cluny, A. D., 1144. 
They removed his body to the Paraclete afterward, and when 
Heloise died, twenty years later, they buried her with him, 
in accordance with her last wish. He died at the ripe age of 
64, and she at 63. After the bodies had remained entombed 
three hundred years, they were removed once more. They 
were removed again in 1800, and finally, seventeen years after- 
ward, they were taken up and transferred to Pere la Chaise, 
where they will remain in peace and quiet until it comes time 
for them to get up and move again. 

History is silent concerning the last acts of the mountain 
howitzer. Let the world say what it will about him, i", at 
least, shall always respect the memory and sorrow for the 
abused trust, and the broken heart, and the troubled spirit of 
the old smooth-bore. Pest and repose be his ! 

Such is the storv of Abelard and Heloise. Such is the his- 



"ENGLISH SPOKEN HERE." 147 

tory that Lamartine has shed such cataracts of tears over. 
But that man never could come within the influence of a sub- 
ject in the least pathetic without overflowing his banks. He 
ought to be dammed — or leveed, I should more properly say. 
Such is the history — not as it is usually told, but as it is when 
stripped of the nauseous sentimentality that would enshrine 
for our loving worship a dastardly seducer like Pierre Abelard. 
I have not a word to say against the misused, faithful girl, and 
would not withhold from her grave a single one of those 
simple tributes which blighted youths and maidens offer to 
her memory, but I am sorry enough that I have not time and 
opportunity to write four or five volumes of my opinion of her 
friend the founder of the Parachute, or the Paraclete, or what- 
ever it was. 

The tons of sentiment I have wasted on that unprincipled 
humbug, in my ignorance ! I shall throttle down my emo- 
tions hereafter, about this sort of people, until I have read 
them up and know whether they are entitled to any tearful 
attentions or not. I wish I had my immortelles back, now, 
and that bunch of radishes. 

In Paris we often saw in shop windows the sign, " English 
Spoken Here" just as one sees in the windows at home the 
sign, " Id on park francaise" We always invaded these places 
at once — and invariably received the information, framed in 
faultless "French, that the clerk who did the English for the 
establishment had just gone to dinner and would be back in 
an hour — would Monsieur buy something? We wondered 
why those parties happened to take their dinners at such 
erratic and extraordinary hours, for we never called at a time 
when an exemplary Christian would be in the least likely to 
be abroad on such an errand. The truth was, it was a base 
fraud — a snare to trap the unwary — chaff to catch fledglings 
with. They had no English-murdering clerk. They trusted 
to the sign to inveigle foreigners into their lairs, and trusted 
to their own blandishments to keep them there till they bought 
something. 

We ferreted out another French imposition* — a frequent 



148 



"AMERICAN DRINKS COMPOUNDED." 



sign to this effect : " All Manner of American Drinks 
Artistically Prepared Here." We procured the services 
of a gentleman experienced in the nomenclature of the Amer- 
ican bar, and moved upon the works of one of these impos- 
tors. A bowing, aproned Frenchman skipped forward and 
said: 

" Que voulez les messieurs ?" I do not know what Que 
voulez les messieurs means, but such was his remark. 

Our General said, " We will take a whisk y-straight." 

[A stare from the Frenchman.] 




AMERICAN DRINKS. 



" Well, if you don't know what that is, give us a cham- 
pagne cock-tail." 

[A stare and a shrug.] 



KOYAL HONORS TO A YANKEE. 14fr 

" Well, then, give us a sherry cobbler." 

The Frenchman was checkmated. This was all Greek to 
him. 

" Give us a brandy smash !" 

The Frenchman began to back away, suspicious of the 
ominous rigor of the last order — began to back away, shrug- 
ging his shoulders and spreading his hands apologetically. 

The General followed him up and gained a complete victory. 
The uneducated foreigner could not even furnish a Santa 
Cruz Punch, an Eye-Opener, a Stone-Fence, or an Earth- 
quake. It was plain that he was a wicked impostor. 

An acquaintance of mine said, the other day, that he was 
doubtless the only American visitor to the Exposition who had 
had the high honor of being escorted by the Emperor's bod/ 
guard. I said with unobtrusive frankness that I was aston- 
ished that such a long-legged, lantern-jawed, unprepossessing 
looking spectre as he should be singled out for a distinction 
like that, and asked how it came about. He said he had at- 
tended a great military review in the Champ de Mars, some 
time ago, and while the multitude about him was growing 
thicker and thicker every moment, he observed an open space 
inside the railing. He left his carriage and went into it. He 
was the only person there, and so he had plenty of room, and 
the situation being central, he could see all the preparation* 
going on about the field. By and by there was a sound of 
music, and soon the Emperor of the French and the Emperor 
of Austria, escorted by the famous Cent Gardes, entered the 
inclosure. They seemed not to observe him, but directly, in 
response to a sign from the commander of the Guard, a young 
lieutenant came toward him with a file of his men following, 
halted, raised his hand and gave the military salute, and 
then said in a low voice that he was sorry to have to disturb 
a stranger and a gentleman, but the place was sacred to roy- 
alty. Then this New Jersey phantom rose up and bowed and 
begged pardon, then with the officer beside him, the file of 
men marching behind him, and with every mark of re- 
spect, he was escorted to his carriage by the imperial Cent 



150 



THE OVER-ESTIMATED GRISETTE. 




fiOYAL HONORS TO A YANKEE. 



Gardes/ The officer saluted again and fell back, the New 
Jersey sprite bowed in return and had presence of mind 

enough to pretend that he had 
simply called on a matter of 
private business with those em- 
perors, and so waved them an 
adieu, and drove from the 
field! 

Imagine a poor Frenchman 
ignorantly intruding upon a 
public rostrum sacred to some 
six-penny dignitary in America. 
The police would scare him to 
death, first, with a storm of 
their elegant blasphemy, and 
then pull him to pieces getting 
him away from there. We are 
measurably superior to the 
French in some things, but they are immeasurably our bet- 
ters in others. 

Enough of Paris for the present. We have done our whole 
duty by it. "We have seen the Tuileries, the Napoleon 
Column, the Madeleine, that wonder of wonders the tomb of 
Napoleon, all the great churches and museums, libraries, im- 
perial palaces, and sculpture and picture galleries, the Pan- 
theon, Jardin des Plantes, the opera, the circus, the Legislative 
Body, the billiard-rooms, the barbers, the grisettes — 

Ah, the grisettes! I had almost forgotten. They are an- 
other romantic fraud. They were (if you let the books of 
travel tell it,) always so beautiful — so neat and trim, so grace* 
ful — so naive and trusting — so gentle, so winning — so faithful 
to their shop duties, so irresistible to buyers in their prattling 
importunity — so devoted to their poverty-stricken students of 
the Latin Quarter — so light hearted and happy on their Sun- 
day picnics in the suburbs — and oh, so charmingly, so delight- 
fully immoral ! 

Stuff! For three or four days I was constantly sayings 



THE OVER-ESTIMATED GRISETTE. 



151 



" Quick, Ferguson ! is that a grisette ? n 

And he always said " No." 

He comprehended, at last, that I wanted to see a grisette. 
Then he showed me dozens of them. They were like nearly 
all the Frenchwomen I ever saw — homely. They had large 
hands, large feet, large mouths ; they had pug noses as a gen- 
eral thing, and mustaches that not even good breeding could 
overlook ; they combed their hair straight back without part- 
ing ; they were ill shaped, they were not winning, they were 
not graceful; I knew 
by their looks that 
they ate garlic and 
onions ; and lastly and 
finally, to my think- 
ing it would be base 
flattery to call them 
immoral. 

Aroint thee, wench ! 
I sorrow for the vaga- 
bond student of the 
Latin Quarter now, 
even more than for- 
merly I envied him. 
Thus topples to earth 
another idol of my in- 
fancy. 

We have seen every 
thing, and to-morrow 
we go to Versailles. 
We shall see Paris 
only for a little while 
as we come back to 

take up our line of march for the ship, and so 1 may 
as well bid the beautiful city a regretful farewell. We shall 
travel many thousands of miles after we leave here, and visit 
many great cities, but we shall find none so enchanting as 
this. 




GRISETTE 



152 A DELIBERATE OPINION. 

Some of our party have gone to England, intending to take 
a roundabout course and rejoin the vessel at Leghorn or 
Naples, several weeks hence. We came near going to Geneva, 
but have concluded to return to Marseilles and go up through 
Italy from Genoa. 

I will conclude this chapter with a remark that I am sin- 
cerely proud to be able to make — and glad, as well, that my 
comrades cordially indorse it, to wit : by far the handsomest 
women we have seen in France were born and reared in 
America. 

I feel, now, like a man who has redeemed a failing reputa- 
tion and shed lustre upon a dimmed escutcheon, by a single 
just deed done at the eleventh hour. 

Let the curtain fall, to slow muaio. 



OHAPTEE XVI. 

YEKSAILLES! It is wonderfully beautiful ! You gaze, 
and stare, and try to understand that it is real, that it 
is on the earth, that it is not the Garden of Eden — but your 
brain grows giddy, stupefied by the world of beauty around 
you, and you half believe you are the dupe of an exquisite 
dream. The scene thrills one like military music ! A noble 
palace, stretching its ornamented front block upon block away, 
till it seemed that it would never end; a grand promenade 
before it, whereon the armies of an empire might parade ; all 
about it rainbows of flowers, and colossal statues that were 
almost numberless, and yet seemed only scattered over the 
ample space ; broad flights of stone steps leading down from 
the promenade to lower grounds of the park — stairways that 
whole regiments might stand to arms upon and have room to 
spare ; vast fountains whose great bronze effigies discharged 
rivers of sparkling water into the air and mingled a hundred 
curving jets together in forms of matchless beauty ; wide grass- 
carpeted avenues that branched hither and thither in every 
direction and wandered to seemingly interminable distances, 
walled all the way on either side with compact ranks of leafy 
trees whose branches met above and formed arches as faultless 
and as symmetrical as ever were carved in stone ; and here 
and there were glimpses of sylvan lakes with miniature ships 
glassed in their surfaces. And every where — on the palace 
steps, and the great promenade, around the fountains, among 
the trees, and far under the arches of the endless avenues, huxi' 



154 



A WONDERFUL PARK. 



dreds and hundreds of people in gay costumes walked or ran 
or danced, and gave to the fairy picture the life and animation 
which was all of perfection it could have lacked. 

It was worth a pilgrimage to see. Every thing is on so 
gigantic a scale. Nothing is small — nothing is cheap. The 
statues are all large ; the palace is grand ; the park covers a 
fair-sized county ; the avenues are interminable. All the 
distances and all the dimensions about Versailles are vast. I 




FOUNTAIN AT VERSAILLES. 



used to think the pictures exaggerated these distances and 
these dimensions beyond all reason, and that they made Ver- 
sailles more beautiful than it was possible for any place in the 
world to be. I know now that the pictures never came up to 
the subject in any respect, and that no painter could represent 
Versailles on canvas as beautiful as it is in reality. I used to 
abuse Louis XIV. for spending two hundred millions of dollars 
in creating this marvelous park, when bread was so scarce 



A WONDERFUL PARK. 155 

with some of his subjects ; but I have forgiven him now. He 
took a tract of land sixty miles in circumference and set to 
work to make this park and build this palace and a road to it 
from Paris. He kept 36,000 men employed daily on it, and 
the labor was so unhealthy that they used to die and be hauled 
off by cart-loads every night. The wife of a nobleman of the 
time speaks of this as an " inconvenience" but naively remarks 
that " it does not seem worthy of attention in the happy state 
of tranquillity we now enjoy." 

I always thought ill of people at home, who trimmed their 
shrubbery into pyramids, and squares, and spires, and all 
manner of unnatural shapes, and when I saw the same thing 
being practiced in this great park I began to feel dissatisfied. 
But I soon saw the idea of the thing and the wisdom of it. 
They seek the general effect. We distort a dozen sickly trees 
into unaccustomed shapes in a little yard no bigger than a 
dining-room, and then surely they look absurd enough. But 
here they take two hundred thousand tall forest trees and set 
them in a double row ; allow no sign of leaf or branch to grow 
on the trunk lower down than six feet above the ground ; 
from that point the boughs begin to project, and very grad- 
ually they extend outward further and further till they meet 
overhead, and a faultless tunnel of foliage is formed. The arch 
is mathematically precise. The effect is then very fine. They 
make trees take fifty different shapes, and so these quaint effects 
are infinitely varied and picturesque. The trees in no two ave- 
nues are shaped alike, and consequently the eye is not fatigued 
with any thing in the nature of monotonous uniformity. I will 
drop this subject now, leaving it to others to determine how 
these people manage to make endless ranks of lofty forest 
trees grow to just a certain thickness of trunk (say a foot and 
two-thirds ;) how they make them spring to precisely the same 
height for miles ; how they make them grow so close together ; 
how they compel one huge limb to spring from the same 
identical spot on each tree and form the main sweep of the 
arch ; and how all these things are kept exactly in the same 
eondition, and in the same exquisite shapeliness and symmetry 



156 A WONDERFUL PARK. 

month after month and year after year — for I have tried to 
reason out the problem, and have failed. 

We walked through the great hall of sculpture and the one 
hundred and fifty galleries of paintings in the palace of Ver- 
sailles, and felt that to be in such a place was useless unless 
one had a whole year at his disposal. These pictures are all 
battle-scenes, and only one solitary little canvas among them 
all treats of anything but great French victories. We wan- 
dered, also, through the Grand Trianon and the Petit Trianon, 
those monuments of royal prodigality, and with histories so 
mournful — filled, as it is, with souvenirs of Napoleon the First, 
and three dead Kings and as many Queens. In one sumptu- 
ous bed they had all slept in succession, but no one occupies it 
now. In a large dining-room stood the table at which Louis 
XIY. and his mistress, Madame Maintenon, and after them 
Louis XV., and Pompadour, had sat at their meals naked and 
unattended — for the table stood upon a trap-door, which de- 
scended with it to regions below when it was necessary 
to replenish its dishes. In a room of the Petit Trianon stood 
the furniture, just as poor Marie Antoinette left it when the 
mob came and dragged her and the King to Paris, never to 
return. ]STear at hand, in the stables, were prodigious carriages 
that showed no color but gold — carriages used by former Kings 
of France on state occasions, and never used now save when a 
kingly head is to be crowned, or an imperial infant christened. 
And with them were some curious sleighs, whose bodies were 
shaped like lions, swans, tigers, etc. — vehicles that had once 
been handsome with pictured designs and fine workmanship, 
but were dusty and decaying now. They had their history. 
When Louis XIV. had finished the Grand Trianon, he told 
Maintenon he had created a Paradise for her, and asked if she 
could think of any thing now to wish for. He said he wished 
the Trianon to be perfection — nothing less. She said she 
cotild think of but one thing — it was summer, and it was 
balmy France — yet she would like well to sleigh-ride in the 
leafy avenues of Versailles ! The next morning found miles 
and miles of grassy avenues spread thick with snowy salt and 



PARADISE LOST. 157 

sugar, and a procession of those quaint sleighs waiting to 
receive the chief concubine of the gayest and most unprinci- 
pled court that France has ever seen ! 

From sumptuous Versailles, with its palaces, its statues, its 
gardens and its fountains, we journeyed back to Paris and 
sought its antipodes — the Faubourg St. Antoine. Little, nar- 
row streets ; dirty children blockading them ; greasy, slovenly 
women capturing and spanking them ; filthy dens on first 
floors, with rag stores in them (the heaviest business in the 
Faubourg is the chiffonier's ;) other filthy dens where whole 
suits of second and third-hand clothing are sold at prices that 
would ruin any proprietor who did not steal his stock ; still 
other filthy dens where they sold groceries — sold them by the 
half-pennyworth — five dollars would buy the man out, good- 
will and all. Up these little crooked streets they will murder 
a man for seven dollars and dump the body in the Seine. 
And up some other of these streets — most of them, I should 
say — live lorettes. 

All through this Faubourg St. Antoine, misery, poverty, 
vice and crime go hand in hand, and the evidences of it stare 
one in the face from every side. Here the people live who 
begin the revolutions. Whenever there is any thing of that 
kind to be done, they are always ready. They take as much 
genuine pleasure in building a barricade as they do in cutting 
a throat or shoving a friend into the Seine. It is these savage- 
looking ruffians who storm the splendid halls of the Tuileries, 
occasionally, and swarm into Versailles when a King is to be 
called to account. 

But they will build no more barricades, they will break no 
more soldiers' heads with paving-stones. Louis Napoleon has 
taken care of all that. He is annihilating the crooked streets, 
and building in their stead noble boulevards as straight as an 
arrow — avenues which a cannon ball could traverse from end 
to end without meeting an obstruction more irresistible than 
the flesh and bones 01 men — boulevards whose stately edifices 
will never afford refuges and plotting-places for starving, dis- 
contented revolution-breeders. Five of these great thorough- 



158 NAPOLEONIC STRATEGY. 

fares radiate from one ample centre — a centre which is exceed- 
ingly well adapted to the accommodation of heavy artillery. 
The mobs nsed to riot there, but they must seek another rally- 
ing-place in future. And this ingenious Napoleon paves the 
streets of his great cities with a smooth, compact composition 
of asphaltum and sand. No more barricades of flag-stones — * 
no more assaulting his Majesty's troops with cobbles. I can 
not feel friendly toward my quondam fellow- American, Napo- 
leon III., especially at this time,* when in fancy I see his 
credulous victim, Maximilian, lying stark and stiff in Mexico, 
and his maniac widow watching eagerly from her French 
asylum for the form that will never come — but I do admire 
his nerve, his calm self-reliance, his shrewd good sense. 

* July, 1861. 



OHAPTEE XVII. 

"TTTE had a pleasant journey of it seaward again. We 
▼ V found that for the three past nights onr ship had 
been in a state of war. The first night the sailors of a British 
ship, being happy with grog, came down on the pier and chal- 
lenged onr sailors to a free fight. They accepted with alac- 
rity, repaired to the pier and gained — their share of a drawn 
battle. Several bruised and bloody members of both parties 
were carried off by the police, and imprisoned until the fol- 
lowing morning. The next night the British boys came again 
to renew the fight, but our men had had strict orders to 
remain on board and out of sight. They did so, and the 
besieging party grew noisy, and more and more abusive as 
the fact became apparent (to them,) that our men were afraid 
to come out. They went away, finally, with a closing burst 
of ridicule and offensive epithets. The third night they came 
again, and were more obstreperous than ever. They swag- 
gered up and down the almost deserted pier, and hurled curses, 
obscenity and stinging sarcasms at our crew. It was more 
than human nature could bear. The executive officer ordered 
our men ashore — with instructions not to fight. They charged 
the British and gained a brilliant victory. I probably would 
not have mentioned this war had it ended differently. But I 
travel to learn, and I still remember that they picture no 
French defeats in the battle-galleries of Versailles. 

It was like home to us to step on board the comfortable 
ship again, and smoke and lounge about her breezy decks. 
And yet it was not altogether like home, either, because so 



160 "home again." 

many members of the family were away. We missed some 
pleasant faces which we would rather have found at dinner, 
and at night there were gaps in the euchre-parties which could 
not be satisfactorily filled. " Moult." was in England, Jack 
in Switzerland, Charley in Spain. Blucher was gone, none 
could tell where. But we were at sea again, and we had the 
stars and the ocean to look at, and plenty of room to meditate 
in. 

In due time the shores of Italy were sighted, and as we 
stood gazing from the decks early in the bright summer morn- 
ing, the stately city of Genoa rose up out of the sea and flung 
back the sunlight from her hundred palaces. 

Here we rest, for the present— or rather, here we have been 
trying to rest, for some little time, but we run about too much 
to accomplish a great deal in that line. 

I would like to remain here. I had rather not go any 
further. There may be prettier women in Europe, but I 
doubt it. The population of Genoa is 120,000 ; two-thirds of 
these are women, I think, and at least two-thirds of the 
women are beautiful. They are as dressy, and as tasteful and 
as graceful as they could possibly be without being angels. 
However, angels are not very dressy, I believe. At least the 
angels in pictures are not — they wear nothing but wings. 
But these Genoese women do look so charming. Most of the 
young demoiselles are robed in a cloud of white from head to 
foot, though many trick themselves out more elaborately. 
Nine-tenths of them wear nothing on their heads but a filmy 
sort of veil, which falls down their backs like a white mist. 
They are very fair, and many of them have blue eyes, but 
black and dreamy dark brown ones are met with oftenest. 

The ladies and gentlemen of Genoa have a pleasant fashion 
of promenading in a large park on the top of a hill in the 
centre of the city, from six till nine in the evening, and then eat- 
ing ices in a neighboring garden an hour or two longer. We 
went to the park on Sunday evening. Two thousand persons 
were present, chiefly young ladies and gentlemen. The gen- 
tlemen were dressed in the very latest Paris fashions, and the 



THE HOME OF FEMALE BEAUTY. 161 

robes of the ladies glinted among the trees like so many snow- 
flakes. The multitude moved round and round the park in a 
great procession. The bands played, and so did the fountains ; 
the moon and the gas lamps lit up the scene, and altogether it 
was a brilliant and an animated picture. I scanned every 
female face that passed, and it seemed to me that all were 
handsome. I never saw such a freshet of loveliness before. 
I do not see how a man of only ordinary decision of character 




"WOMEN OF GEXOA. 



could marry here, because, before he could get his mind mad« 
up he would fall in love with somebody else. 

Never smoke any Italian tobacco. Never do it on any 
account. It makes me shudder to think what it must be made 
©f. You can not throw an old cigar " stub " down any where, 
but some vagabond will pounce upon it on the instant. I 
like to smoke a good deal, but it wounds my sensibilities to 
see one of these stub-hunters watching me out of the corners 

11 



162 AMONG THE PALACES. 

of his hungry eyes and calculating how long my cigar will be 
likely to last. It reminded me too painfully of that San 
Francisco undertaker who used to go to sick-beds with his 
watch in his hand and time the corpse. One of these stub- 
nunters followed us all over the park last night, and we never 
had a smoke that was worth any thing. We were always 
moved to appease him with the stub before the cigar was half 
,'^one, because he looked so viciously anxious. He regarded us 
as his own legitimate prey, by right of discovery, I think, 
because he drove off several other professionals who wanted 
to take stock in us. 

Now, they surely must chew up those old stubs, and dry 
and sell them for smoking-tobacco. Therefore, give your 
custom to other than Italian brands of the article. 

" The Superb " and the " City of Palaces " are names which 
Genoa has held for centuries. She is full of palaces, certainly, 
and the palaces are sumptuous inside, but they are very rusty 
without, and make no pretensions to architectural magnifi- 
cence. " G-enoa, the Superb," would be a felicitous title if it 
referred to the women. 

We have visited several of the palaces — immense thick- 
walled piles, with great stone staircases, tesselated marble 
pavements on the floors, (sometimes they make a mosaic work, 
of intricate designs, wrought in pebbles, or little fragments of 
marble laid in cement,) and grand salons hung with pictures 
by Rubens, Guido, Titian, Paul Veronese, and so on, and 
portraits of heads of the family, in plumed helmets and gal- 
lant coats of mail, and patrician ladies, in stunning costumes 
of centuries ago. But, of course, the folks were all out in the 
country for the summer, and might not have known enough to 
ask us to dinner if they had been at home, and so all the 
grand empty salons, with their resounding pavements, their 
grim pictures of dead ancestors, and tattered banners with the 
dust of bygone centuries upon them, seemed to brood solemnly 
of death and the grave, and our spirits ebbed away, and our 
cheerfulness passed from us. We never went up to the elev- 
enth story. We always be^&n to suspect ghosts. There was 



AMONG THE PALACES, 



163 



always «d andertaker-looking servant along, too, who handed 
us a programme, pointed to the picture that began the list of 
the \ilon he was in, and then stood stiff and stark and unsmil- 
ing in his petrified livery till we were ready to move on 

to the next chamber, where- 
upon he marched sadly 
ahead and took up another 
malignantly respectful posi- 
tion as before. I wasted so 
much time praying that the 
roof would fall in on these 




PETRIFIED LACKEY. 



dispiriting flunkeys that I had but little left to bestow upon 
palace and pictures. 

And besides, as in Paris, we had a guide. Perdition catch 
all the guides. This one said he was the most gifted linguist 
in Genoa, as far as English was concerned, and that only two 
persons in the city beside himself could talk the language at 
all. He showed us the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, 



164 



CHURCH MAGNIFICENCE, 



and after we had reflected in silent awe before it for fifteen 
minutes, lie said it was not the birthplace of Columbus, but 
of Columbus's grandmother ! When we demanded an expla- 
nation of his conduct he only shrugged his shoulders and 
answered in barbarous Italian. I shall speak further of this 
guide in a future chapter. All the information we got out of 
him we shall be able to carry along with us, I think. 

I have not been to church so often in a long time as I have 

in the last few weeks. 
The people in these old 
, lands seem to make 
churches their specialty. 
Especially does this 
seem to be the case with 
the citizens of Genoa. 
I think there is a church 
every three or four hun- 
dred yards all over town. 
The streets are sprinkled 
from end to end with 
shovel-hatted, long- 

robed, well-fed priests, 
and the church bells by 
dozens are pealing all 
the day long, nearly. 
Every now and then one 
comes across a friar of 
orders gray, with shaven 
head, long, coarse robe, rope girdle and beads, and with feet 
cased in sandals or entirely bare. These worthies suffer in 
the flesh, and do penance all their lives, I suppose, but they look 
like consummate famine-breeders. They are all fat and serene. 
The old Cathedral of San Lorenzo is about as notable a 
building as we have found in Genoa. It is vast, and has 
colonnades of noble pillars, and a great organ, and the cus- 
tomary pomp of gilded moldings, pictures, frescoed ceilings, and 
so forth. I can not describe it, of course— it would require a 




PRIEST AND FRIAR. 



CHURCH MAGNIFICENCE. 165 

good many pages to do that. But it is a curious place. They 
said that half of it — from the front door half way down to the 
altar — was a Jewish Synagogue before the Saviour was born, 
and that no alteration had been made in it since that time. 
We doubted the statement, but did it reluctantly. We would 
much rather have believed it. The place looked in too perfect 
repair to be so ancient. 

The main point of interest about the Cathedral is the little 
Chapel of St. John the Baptist. They only allow women to 
enter it on one day in the year, on account of the animosity 
they still cherish against the sex because of the murder of the 
Saint to gratify a caprice of Herodias. In this Chapel is a 
marble chest, in which, they told us, were the ashes of St 
John ; and around it was wound a chain, which, they said, 
had confined him when he was in prison. We did not desire 
to disbelieve these statements, and yet we could not feel cer- 
tain that they were correct — partly because we could have 
broken that chain, and so could St. John, and partly because 
we had seen St. John's ashes before, in another Church. We 
could not bring ourselves to think St. John had two sets of 
ashes. 

They also showed us a portrait of the Madonna which was 
painted by St. Luke, and it did not look half as old and 
smoky as some of the pictures by Rubens. We could not help 
admiring the Apostle's modesty in never once mentioning in 
his writings that he could paint. 

But isn't this relic matter a little overdone ? We find a 
piece of the true cross in every old church we go into, and 
some of the nails that held it together. I would not like to 
be positive, but I think we have seen as much as a keg of 
these nails. Then there is the crown of thorns; they have 
part of one in Sainte Chapelle, in Paris, and part of one, also, 
in Notre Dame. And as for bones of St. Denis, I feel certain 
we have seen enough of them to duplicate him, if necessary. 

I only meant to write about the churches, but I keep wan- 
dering from the subject. I could say that the Church of the 
Annunciation is a wilderness of beautiful columns, of statues, 



166 HOW THEY LIVE. 

gilded moldings, and pictures almost countless, but that 
would give no one an entirely perfect idea of the thing, and 
so where is the use ? One family built the whole edifice, and 
have got money left. There is where the mystery lies. We 
had an idea at first that only a mint could have survived the 
expense. 

These people here live in the heaviest, highest, broadest, 
darkest, solidest houses one can imagine. Each one might 
" laugh a siege to scorn." A hundred feet front and a hun- 
dred high is about the style, and you go up three flights of 
stairs before you begin to come upon signs of occupancy. 
Every thing is stone, and stone of the heaviest — floors, stair- 
ways, mantels, benches — every thing. The walls are four to 
five feet thick. The streets generally are four or five to eight 
feet wide and as crooked as a corkscrew. You go along one 
of these gloomy cracks, and look up and behold the sky like a 
mere ribbon of light, far above your head, where the tops of 
the tall houses on either side of the street bend almost 
together. You feel as if you were at the bottom of some tre- 
mendous abyss, with all the world far above you. You wind 
in and out and here and there, in the most mysterious way, 
and have no more idea of the points of the compass than if you 
were a blind man. You can never persuade yourself that 
these are actually streets, and the frowning, dingy, monstrous 
houses dwellings, till you see one of these beautiful, prettily 
dressed women emerge from them — see her emerge from a 
dark, dreary-looking den that looks dungeon all over, from the 
ground away half-way up to heaven. And then you wonder 
that such a charming moth could come from such a forbidding 
shell as that. The streets are wisely made narrow and the 
houses heavy and thick and stony, in order that the people 
may be cool in this roasting climate. And they are cool, and 
stay so. And while I think of it — the men wear hats and 
have very dark complexions, but the women wear no head- 
gear but a flimsy veil like a gossamer's web, and yet are 
exceedingly fair as a general thing. Singular, isn't it f 

The huge palaces of Genoa are each supposed to be occupied 



MASSIVE ARCHITECTURE. 167 

by one family, but they could accommodate a hundred, I should 
think They are relics of the grandeur of Genoa's palmy days 
- — the days when she was a great commercial and maritime 
power several centuries ago. These houses, solid marble pal- 
aces though they be, are in many cases of a dull pinkish color, 
outside, and from pavement to eaves are pictured with Genoese 
battle-scenes, with monstrous Jupiters and Cupids and with 
familiar illustrations from Grecian mythology. Where the 
paint has yielded to age and exposure and is peeling off in 
flakes and patches, the effect is not happy. A noseless Cupid, 
or a Jupiter with an eye out, or a Yenus with a fly -blister 
on her breast, are not attractive features in a picture. Some 
of these painted walls reminded me somewhat of the tall van, 
plastered with fanciful bills and posters, that follows the band- 
wagon of a circus about a country village. I have not read or 
heard that the outsides of the houses of any other European 
city are frescoed in this way. 

I can not conceive of such a thing as Genoa in ruins. Such 
massive arches, such ponderous substructions as support these 
towering broad- winged edifices, we have seldom seen before ; 
and surely the great blocks of stone of which these edifices are 
built can never decay ; walls that are as thick as an ordinary 
American doorway is high, can not crumble. 

The Republics of Genoa and Pisa were very powerful in the 
middle ages. Their ships filled the Mediterranean, and they 
carried on an extensive commerce with Constantinople and 
Syria. Their warehouses were the great distributing depots 
from whence the costly merchandise of the East was sent 
abroad over Europe. They were warlike little nations, and 
defied, in those days, governments that overshadow them now 
as mountains overshadow molehills. The Saracens captured 
and pillaged Genoa nine hundred years ago, but during the 
following century Genoa and Pisa entered into an offensive 
and defensive alliance and besieged the Saracen colonies in 
Sardinia and the Balearic Isles with an obstinacy that main- 
tained its pristine vigor and held to its purpose for forty long 
years. They were victorious at last, and divided their con- 



168 



A SCRAP OF ANCIENT HISTORY. 



quests equably among their great patrician families. Descen- 
dants of some of those proud families still inhabit the palaces 
of Genoa, and trace in their own features a resemblance to the 
grim knights whose portraits hang in their stately halls, and 
to pictured beauties with pouting lips and merry eyes whose 
originals have been dust and ashes for many a dead and for- 
gotten century. 

The hotel we live in belonged to one of those great orders 
of knights of the Cross in the times of the Crusades, and its 
mailed sentinels once kept watch and ward in its massive 

turrets and woke the 
echoes of these halls and 
corridors with their iron 
heels. 

But Genoa's greatness 
has degenerated into an 
unostentatious commerce 
in velvets and silver fila- 
gree work. They say that 
each European town has 
its specialty. These fila- 
gree things are Genoa's 
specialty. Her smiths take 
silver ingots and work 
them up into all manner 
of graceful and beautiful 
forms. They make bunch- 
es of flowers, from flakes 
and wires of silver, that 
counterfeit the delicate cre- 
ations the frost weaves 
upon a window pane ; and we were shown a miniature silver 
temple whose fluted columns, whose Corinthian capitals and 
rich entablatures, whose spire, statues, bells, and ornate lavish^ 
ness of sculpture were wrought in polished silver, and with 
such matchless art that every detail was a fascinating study, 
and the finished edifice a wonder of beauty. 




STATUE OF COLUMBUS. 



GRAVES FOR SIXTY THOUSAND 



169 



W e are ready to move again, though we are not really tired, 
yet) of the narrow passages of this old marble cave. Cave is a 
good word — when speaking of Genoa under the stars. When 
we have been prowling at midnight through the gloomy crev- 
ices they call streets, where no foot falls but ours were echoing, 
where only ourselves were abroad, and lights appeared only at 
long intervals and at a distance, and mysteriously disappeared 




GRAVES OF SIXTY THOUSAND. 



again, and the houses at our elbows seemed to stretch upward 
farther than ever toward the heavens, the memory of a cave I 
used to know at home was always in my mind, with its lofty 
passages, its silence and solitude, its shrouding gloom, its 
sepulchral echoes, its flitting lights, and more than all, its 
sudden revelations of branching crevices and corridors where 
we least expected them. 

We are not tired of the endless processions of cheerful, chat- 
tering gossipers that throng these courts and streets all day 
long, either ; nor of the coarse-robed monks ; nor of the u Asti " 



170 GRAVES FOR SIXTY THOUSAND. 

vines, which that old doctor (whom we call the Oracle,) 
customary felicity in the matter of getting every thing wrong, 
misterms " nasty." But we must go, nevertheless. 

Our last sight was the cemetery, (a burial-place intended to 
accommodate 60,000 bodies,) and we shall continue to remem- 
ber it after we shall have forgotten the palaces. It is a vast 
marble collonaded corridor extending around a great unoccu- 
pied square of ground ; its broad floor is marble, and on every 
slab is an inscription — for every slab covers a corpse. On 
either side, as one walks down the middle of the passage, are 
monuments, tombs, and sculptured figures that are exquisitely 
wrought and are full of grace and beauty. They are new, 
and snowy ; every outline is perfect, every feature guiltless of 
mutilation, flaw or blemish ; and therefore, to us these far- 
reaching ranks of bewitching forms are a hundred fold more 
lovely than the damaged and dingy statuary they have saved 
from the wreck of ancient art and set up in the galleries of 
Paris for the worship of the world. 

Well provided with cigars and other necessaries of life, we 
are now ready to take the cars for Milan. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

ALL day long we sped through a mountainous country 
whose peaks were bright with sunshine, whose hillsides 
were dotted with pretty villas sitting in the midst of gardens 
and shrubbery, and whose deep ravines were cool and shady, 
and looked ever so inviting from where we and the birds were 
winging our flight through the sultry upper air. 

We had plenty of chilly tunnels wherein to check our per- 
spiration, though. We timed one of them. We were twenty 
minutes passing through it, going at the rate of thirty to 
thirty-five miles an hour. 

Beyond Alessandria we passed the battle-field of Marengo. 

Toward dnsk we drew near Milan, and caught glimpses of 
the city and the blue mountain peaks beyond. But we were 
not caring for these things — they did not interest us in the 
least. We were in a fever of impatience ; we were dying to 
see the renowned Cathedral ! We watched — in this direction 
and that — all around — every where. We needed no one to 
point it out — we did not wish any one to point it out — we 
would recognize it, even in the desert of the great Sahara. 

At last, a forest of graceful needles, shimmering in the 
amber sunlight, rose slowly above the pigmy house-tops, as 
one sometimes sees, in the far horizon, a gilded and pinnacled 
mass of cloud lift itself above the waste of waves, at sea, — the 
Cathedral ! We knew it in a moment. 

Half of that night, and all of the next day, this architectural 
autocrat was our sole object of interest. 

WTiat a wonder it is ! So grand, so solemn, so vast ! And 



172 THE GRAND MILAN CATHEDRAL. 

yet so delicate, so airy, so graceful ! A very world of solid 
weight, and yet it seems in the soft moonlight only a fairy 
delusion of frost-work that might vanish with a breath ! How 
sharply its pinnacled angles and its wilderness of spires were 
cut against the sky, and how richly their shadows fell upon its 
snowy roof ! It was a vision ! — a miracle! — an anthem sung 
in stone, a poem wrought in marble ! 

Howsoever you look at the great Cathedral, it is noble, it is 
beautiful ! Wherever you stand in Milan, or within seven 
miles of Milan, it is visible — and when it is visible, no other 
object can chain yonr whole attention. Leave your eyes 
unfettered by your will but a single instant and they will 
surely turn to seek it. It is the first thing you look for when 
you rise in the morning, and the last your lingering gaze rests 
upon at night. Surely, it must be the princeliest creation that 
ever brain of man conceived. 

At nine o'clock in the morning we went and stood before 
this marble colossus. The central one of its five great doors is 
bordered with a bas-relief of birds and fruits and beasts and 
insects, which have been so ingeniously carved out of the 
marble that they seem like living creatures — and the figures 
are so numerous and the design so complex, that one might 
study it a week without exhausting its interest. On the great 
steeple — surmounting the myriad of spires — inside of the spires 
— over the doors, the windows — in nooks and corners — every 
where that a niche or a perch can be found about the enor- 
mous building, from summit to base, there is a marble statue, 
and every statue is a study in itself! Raphael, Angelo, 
Canova — giants like these gave birth to the designs, and their 
own pupils carved them. Every face is eloquent with expres- 
sion, and every attitude is full of grace. Away above, on the 
lofty roof, rank on rank of carved and fretted spires spring 
high in the air, and through their rich tracery one sees the sky 
beyond. In their midst the central steeple towers proudly up 
like the mainmast of some great Indiaman among a fleet of 
coasters. 

We wished to go aloft The sacristan showed us a marble 




ROOFS AND BFIEES OF CATHEDRAL AT &TTLAN. 



THE GRAND MILAN CATHEDRAL. 



173 



6tairway (of course it was marble, and of the purest and whitest 
— there is no other stone, no brick, no wood, among its build- 




CEXTRAL DOOR OF CATHEDRAL AT MILAX. 



ing materials,) and told us to go up one hundred and eighty- 
two steps and stop till he came. It was not necessary to say 
stop — we should have done that any how. We were tired by 
the time we got there. This was the roof. Here, springing 
from its broad marble flagstones, were the long files of spires, 
looking very tall close at hand, but diminishing in the dis- 
tance like the pipes of an organ. We could see, now, that 
the statue on the top of each was the size of a large man, 
though they all looked like dolls from the street. We could 



174 



HIDEOUS PERFECTION IN SCULPTURE 



see, also, that from the inside of each and every one of these 
hollow spires, from sixteen to thirty-one beautiful marble 
statues looked out upon the world below. 

From the eaves to the comb of the roof stretched in endless 
succession great curved marble beams, like the fore-and-aft 
braces of a steamboat, and along each beam from end to end? 
stood up a row of richly carved flowers and fruits — each sep- 
arate and distinct in kind, and over 15,000 species represented. 
At a little distance these rows seem to close together like the 
ties of a railroad track, and then the mingling together of the 




INTERIOR OF THE CATHEDRAL AT MILAN. 



buds and blossoms of this marble garden forms a picture that 
is very charming to the eye. 

We descended and entered. Within the church, long rows 
of fluted columns, like huge monuments, divided the building 



AN UNPLEASANT ADVENTURE. 175 

into broad aisles, and on the figured pavement fell many a 
soft blush from the painted windows above. I knew the 
church was very large, but I could not fully appreciate its 
great size until I noticed that the men standing far down by 
the altar looked like boys, and seemed to glide, rather than 
Walk. We loitered about gazing aloft at the monster windows 
all aglow with brilliantly colored scenes in the lives of the 
Saviour and his followers. Some of these pictures are mosaics, 
and so artistically are their thousand particles of tinted glass 
or stone put together that the work has all the smoothness 
and finish of a painting. We counted sixty panes of glass in 
one window, and each pane was adorned with one of these 
master achievements of genius and patience. 

The guide showed us a coffee-colored piece of sculpture 
which he said was considered to have come from the hand of 
Phidias, since it was not possible that any other artist, of any 
epoch, could have copied nature with such faultless accuracy. 
The figure was that of a man without a skin ; with every vein, 
artery, muscle, every fibre and tendon and tissue of the human 
frame, represented in minute detail. It looked natural, because 
somehow it looked as if it were in pain. A skinned man 
would be likely to look that way, unless his attention were 
occupied with some other matter. It was a hideous thing, and 
yet there was a fascination about it some where. I am very 
sorry I saw it, because I shall always see it, now. I shall 
dream of it, sometimes. I shall dream that it is resting its 
corded arms on the bed's head and looking down on me with 
its dead eyes ; I shall dream that it is stretched between the 
sheets with me and touching me with its exposed muscles and 
its stringy cold legs. 

It is hard to forget repulsive things. I remember yet how 
I ran off from school once, when I was a boy, and then, pretty 
late at night, concluded to climb into the window of my 
father's office and sleep on a lounge, because I had a delicacy 
about going home and getting thrashed. As I lay on the 
lounge and my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I 
fancied I could see a long, dusky, shapeless thing stretched 



176 



AN UNPLEASANT ADVENTURE 



upon the floor. A cold shiver went through me. I turned 
my face to the wall. That did not answer. I was afraid that 
that thing would creep over and seize me in the dark. I 
turned back and stared at it for minutes and minutes — they 
seemed hours. It appeared to me that the lagging moonlight 
never, never would get to it. I turned to the wall and 
counted twenty, to pass the feverish time away. I looked — 
the pale square was nearer. I turned again and counted fifty 
— it was almost touching it. With desperate will I turned 
again and counted one hundred, and faced about, all in a 
tremble. A white human hand lay in the moonlight ! Such 




BOYHOOD EXPERIENCE. 



an awful sinking at the heart — such a sudden gasp for breath ! 
I f e it — I can not tell what I felt. When I recovered strength 
enough, I faced the wall again. But no boy could have 
remained so, with that mysterious hand behind him. I 
counted again, and looked— the most of a naked arm was 



A GOOD MAN. 177 

exposed. I put my hands over my eyes and counted till I 
sould stand it no longer, and then — the pallid face of a man 
was there, with the corners of the mouth drawn down, and 
the eyes fixed and glassy in death ! I raised to a sitting pos- 
ture and glowered on that corpse till the light crept down the 
bare breast, — line by line — inch by inch — past the nipple, — 
and then it disclosed a ghastly stab ! 

I went away from there. I do not say that I went away in 
any sort of a hurry, but I simply went — that is sufficient. I 
went out at the window, and I carried the sash along with me. 
I did not need the sash, but it was handier to take it than it 
was to leave it, and so I took it. — I was not scared, but I was 
considerably agitated. 

When I reached home, they whipped me, but I enjoyed it. 
It seemed perfectly delightful. That man had been stabbed 
near the office that afternoon, and they carried him in there to 
doctor him, but he only lived an hour. I have slept in the 
same room with him often, since then — in my dreams. 

Now we will descend into the crypt, under the grand altar 
of Milan Cathedral, and receive an impressive sermon from 
lips that have been silent and hands that have been gestureles* 
for three hundred years. 

The priest stopped in a small dungeon and held up his 
candle. This was the last resting-place of a good man, a 
warm-hearted, unselfish man ; a man whose whole life was 
given to succoring the poor, encouraging the faint-hearted, 
visiting the sick ; in relieving distress, whenever and wherever 
he found it. His heart, his hand and his purse were always 
open. With his story in one's mind he can almost see his 
benignant countenance moving calmly among the haggard 
faces of Milan in the days when the plague swept the city, 
brave where all others were cowards, full of compassion where 
pity had been crushed out of all other breasts by the instinct 
of self-preservation gone mad with terror, cheering all, praying 
with all, helping all, with hand and brain and purse, at a 
time when parents forsook their children, the friend deserted 

12 



178 A SERMON FROM THE TOMB. 

the friend, and the brother turned away from the sister while 
her pleadings were still wailing in his ears. 

This was good St. Charles Borrom^o, Bishop of Milan. The 
people idolized him; princes lavished uncounted treasures 
upon him. We stood in his tomb. Near by was the sarcoph- 
agus, lighted by the dripping candles. The walls were faced 
with bas-reliefs representing scenes in his life done in massive 
silver. The priest put on a short white lace garment over his 
black robe, crossed himself, bowed reverently, and began to 
turn a windlass slowly. The sarcophagus separated in two 
parts, lengthwise, and the lower part .sank down and disclosed 
a coffin of rock crystal as clear as the atmosphere. Within lay 
the body, robed in costly habiliments covered with gold em- 
broidery and starred with scintillating gems. The decaying 
head was black with age, the dry skin was drawn tight to the 
bones, the eyes were gone, there was a hole in the temple and 
another in the cheek, and the skinny lips were parted as in a 
ghastly smile ! Over this dreadful face, its dust and decay, 
and its mocking grin, hung a crown sown thick with flashing 
brilliants ; and upon the breast lay crosses and croziers of 
solid gold that were splendid with emeralds and diamonds. 

How poor, and cheap, and trivial these gew-gaws seemed in 
presence of the solemnity, the grandeur, the awful majesty of 
Death ! Think of Milton, Shakspeare, Washington, standing 
before a reverent world tricked out in the glass beads, the 
brass ear-rings and tin trumpery of the savages of the plains ! 

Dead Bartolomeo preached his pregnant sermon, and its 
burden was : You that worship the vanities of earth — you that 
long for worldly honor, worldly wealth, worldly fame — behold 
their worth ! 

To us it seemed that so good a man, so kind a heart, so 
simple a nature, deserved rest and peace in a grave sacred 
from the intrusion of prying eyes, and believed that he him- 
self would have preferred to have it so, but peradventure our 
wisdom was at fault in this regard. 

As we came out upon the floor of the church again, another 
priest volunteered to show us the treasures of the churoli. 



aladdin's treasure-house. 



179 



What, more % The furniture of the narrow chamber of death 
we had just visited, weighed six millions of francs in ounces 
and carats alone, without a penny thrown into the account for 
the costly workmanship bestowed upon them ! But we fol- 
lowed into a large room filled with tall wooden presses like 
wardrobes. He threw them open, and behold, the cargoes of 
" crude bullion " of the assay offices of Nevada faded out of 
my memory. There were Yirgins and bishops there, above 
their natural size, made of solid silver, each worth, by weight, 




TREASURES OP THE CATHEDRAL. 

from eight hundred thousand to two millions of francs, and 
bearing gemmed books in their hands worth eighty thousand ; 
there were bas-reliefs that weighed six hundred pounds, carved 
in solid silver ; croziers and crosses, and candlesticks six and 
eight feet high, all of virgin gold, and brilliant with precious 
stones ; and beside these were all manner of cups and vases, 
and such things, rich in proportion. It was an Aladdin's 



180 COST OF CATHEDRAL. 

palace. The treasures here, by simple weight, without count- 
ing workmanship, were valued at fifty millions of francs ! If 
I could get the custody of them for a while, I fear me the mar- 
ket price of silver bishops would advance shortly, on account 
of their exceeding scarcity in the Cathedral of Milan. 

The priests showed us two of St. Paul's fingers, and one of 
St. Peter's ; a bone of Judas Iscariot, (it was black.) and also 
bones of all the other disciples ; a handkerchief in which the 
Saviour had left the impression of his face. Among the most 
precious of the relics were a stone from the Holy Sepulchre, 
part of the crown of thorns, (they have a whole one at Notre 
Dame,) a fragment of the purple robe worn by the Saviour, a 
nail from the Cross, and a picture of the Virgin and Child 
painted by the veritable hand of St. Luke. This is the second 
of St. Luke's Virgins we have seen. Once a year all these 
holy relics are carried in procession through the streets of 
Milan. 

I like to revel in the dryest details of the great cathedral. 
The building is five hundred feet long by one hundred and 
eighty wide, and the principal steeple is in the neighborhood 
of four hundred feet high. It has 7,148 marble statues, and 
will have upwards of three thousand more when it is finished. 
In addition, it has one thousand five hundred bas-reliefs. It 
has one hundred and thirty-six spires — twenty-one more are to 
be added. Each spire is surmounted by a statue six and a 
half feet high. Every thing about the church is marble, and 
all from the same quarry ; it was bequeathed to the Archbish- 
opric for this purpose centuries ago. So nothing but the 
mere workmanship costs ; still that is expensive — the bill foots 
up six hundred and eighty-four millions of francs, thus far 
(considerably over a hundred millions of dollars,) and it is 
estimated that it will take a hundred and twenty years yet 
to finish the cathedral. It looks complete, but is far from 
being so. We saw a new statue put in its niche yesterday, 
alongside of one which had been standing these four hundred 
je&rs, they said. There are four staircases leading up to the 
main steeple, each of which cost a hundred thousand dollars, 



FATE OF THE ARCHITECT 



181 



with the four hundred and eight statues which adorn them. 
Marco Compioni was the architect who designed the wonderful 
structure more than five hundred years ago, and it took him 
forty-six years to work out the plan and get it ready to hand 




CATHEDRAL AT MILAN. 



over to the builders. He is dead now. The building was 
begun a little less than five hundred years ago, and the third 
generation hence will not see it completed. 

The building looks best by moonlight, because the older 
portions of it being stained with age, contrast unpleasantly 



182 ADIEU. 

with the newer and whiter portions. It seems somewhat too 
broad for its height, but may be familiarity with it might dissi- 
pate this impression. 

They say that the Cathedral of Milan is second only to St. 
Peter's at Kome. I can not understand how it can be second 
to any thing made by human hands. 

We bid it good-bye, now — possibly for all time. How surely, 
in some future day, when the memory of it shall have lost its 
vividness, shall we half believe we have seen it in a wonderful 
dream, but never with waking eyes ! 



CHAPTEE XIX. 



44 



H\0 yon wis zo haut can be?" 



That was what the guide asked, when we were look- 
ing np at the bronze horses on the Arch of Peace. It meant, 
do you wish to go up there ? I give it as a specimen of guide- 
English. These are the people that make life a burthen to the 
tourist. Their tongues are never still. They talk forever and 
forever, and that is the kind of billingsgate they use. Inspi- 
ration itself could hardly comprehend them. If they would 
only show you a masterpiece of art, or a venerable tomb, or a 
prison-house, or a battle-field, hallowed by touching memories 
or historical reminiscences, or grand traditions, and then step 
aside and hold still for ten minutes and let you think, it would 
not be so bad. But they interrupt every dream, every pleas- 
ant train of thought, with their tiresome cackling. Some- 
times when I have been standing before some cherished old 
idol of mine that I remembered years and years ago in pic- 
tures in the geography at school, I have thought I would give 
a whole world if the human parrot at my side would suddenly 
perish where he stood and leave me to gaze, and ponder, and 
worship. 

No, we did not " wis zo haut can be." We wished to go t© 
La Scala, the largest theatre in the world, I think they call it. 
We did so. It was a large place. Seven separate and distinct 
masses of humanity — six great circles and a monster parquette. 

We wished to go to the Ambrosian Library, and we did that 
also. We saw a manuscript of Yirgil, with annotations in the 
handwriting of Petrarch, the gentleman who loved another 



184 



DEFENSE OF li MK. LAURA.' 



man's Laura, and lavished upon her all through life a love 
which was a clear waste of the raw material. It was sound 
sentiment, but bad judgment. It brought both parties fame, 




LA SCALA THEATRE. 



and created a fountain of commiseration for them in senti- 
mental breasts that is running yet. But who says a word in 
behalf of poor Mr. Laura ? (I do not know his other name.) 
"Who glorifies him ? Who bedews him with tears ? Who 
writes poetry about him 1 Nobody. How do you suppose he 
liked the state of things that has given the world so much 
pleasure ? How did he enjoy having another man following 
his wife every where and making her name a familiar word in 
every garlic-exterminating mouth in Italy with his sonnets to 
her pre-empted eyebrows ? They got fame and sympathy — he 
got neither. This is a peculiarly felicitous instance of what is 
called poetical justice. It is all very fine; but it does not 
chime with my notions of right. It is too one-sided — too un- 



LUCREZ1A BORGIA. 185 

generous. Let the world go on fretting about Laura and 
Petrarch if it will ; but as for me, my tears and my lamenta- 
tions shall be lavished upon the unsung defendant. 

We saw also an autograph letter of Lucrezia Borgia, a lady 
for whom I have always entertained the highest respect, on 
account of her rare histrionic capabilities, her opulence in solid 
gold goblets made of gilded wood, her high distinction as an 
operatic screamer, and the facility with which she could order 
a sextuple funeral and get the corpses ready for it. We saw 
one single coarse yellow hair from Lucrezia's head, likewise. 
It awoke emotions, but we still live. In this same library we 
saw some drawings by Michael Angelo (these Italians call him 
Mickel Angelo,) and Leonardo da Yinci. (They spell it Yinci 
and pronounce it Yinchy ; foreigners always spell better than 
they pronounce.) We reserve our opinion of these sketches. 

In another building they showed us a fresco representing some 
lions and other beasts drawing chariots ; and they seemed to 
project so far from the wall that we took them to be sculp- 
tures. The artist had shrewdly heightened the delusion by 
painting dust on the creatures' backs, as if it had fallen there 
naturally and properly. Smart fellow — if it be smart to 
deceive strangers. 

Elsewhere we saw a huge Roman amphitheatre, with its 
stone seats still in good preservation. Modernized, it is now 
the scene of more peaceful recreations than the exhibition of a 
party of wild beasts with Christians for dinner. Part of the 
time, the Milanese use it for a race track, and at other seasons 
they flood it with water and have spirited yachting regattas 
there. The guide told us these things, and he would hardly 
try so hazardous an experiment as the telling of a falsehood, 
when it is all he can do to speak the truth in English without 
getting the lock-jaw. 

In another place we were shown a sort of summer arbor, with 
a fence before it. We said that was nothing. We looked 
again, and saw, through the arbor, an endless stretch of gar- 
den, and shrubbery, and grassy lawn. We were perfectly wih 
ling to go in there and rest, but it could not be done. It was 



186 DISTRESSING BILLIARDS. 

only another delusion — a painting by some ingenious artist 
with little charity in his heart for tired folk. The deception 
was perfect. ISo one could have imagined the park was not 
real. We even thought we smelled the flowers at first. 

We got a carriage at twilight and drove in the shaded ave- 
nues with the other nobility, and after dinner we took wine 
and ices in a fine garden with the great public. The music 
was excellent, the flowers and shrubbery were pleasant to the 
eye, the scene was vivacious, every body was genteel and well- 
behaved, and the ladies were slightly moustached, and hand- 
somely dressed, but very homely. 

We adjourned to a cafe and played billiards an hour, and I 
made six or seven points by the doctor pocketing his ball, and 
he made as many by my pocketing my ball. We came near 
making a carom sometimes, but not the one we were trying to 
make. The table was of the usual European stylo — cushions 
dead and twice as high as the balls ; the cues in bad repair. 
The natives play only a sort of pool on them. We have never 
seen any body playing the French three-ball game yet, and I 
doubt if there is any such game known in France, or that there 
lives any man mad enough to try to play it on one of these 
European tables. We had to stop playing, finally, because 
Dan got to sleeping fifteen minutes between the counts and 
paying no attention to his marking. 

Afterward we walked up and down one of the most popular 
streets for some time, enjoying other people's comfort and 
wishing we could export some of it to our restless, driving, 
vitality-consuming marts at home. Just in this one matter 
lies the main charm of life in Europe — comfort. In America, 
we hurry — which is well ; but when the day's work is done, 
we go on thinking of losses and gains, we plan for the morrow, 
we even carry our business cares to bed with us, and toss and 
worry over them when we ought to be restoring our racked 
bodies and brains with sleep. We burn up our energies with 
these excitements, and either die early or drop into a lean and 
mean old age at a time of life which they call a man's prime 
in Europe. When an acre of ground has produced long and 



THE CHARM OF EUROPEAN LIFE. 187 

well, we let it lie fallow and rest for a season ; we take no man 
clear across the continent in the same coach he started in — the 
coach is stabled somewhere on the plains and its heated ma- 
chinery allowed to cool for a few days ; when a razor has seen 
long service and refuses to hold an edge, the barber lays it 
away for a few weeks, and the edge comes back of its own 
accord. We bestow thoughtful care upon inanimate objects, 
but none upon ourselves. What a robust people, what a na- 
tion of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves 
on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges ! 

I do envy these Europeans the comfort they take. When 
the work of the day is done, they forget it. Some of them go, 
with wife and children, to a beer hall, and sit quietly and gen- 
teelly drinking a mug or two of ale and listening to music ; 
others walk the streets, others drive in the avenues ; others 
assemble in the great ornamental squares in the early evening 
to enjoy the sight and the fragrance of flowers and to hear the 
military bands play — no European city being without its fine 
military music at eventide ; and yet others of the populace sit 
in the open air in front of the refreshment house's and eat ices 
and drink mild beverages that could not harm a child. They 
go to bed moderately early, and sleep well. They are always 
quiet, always orderly, always cheerful, comfortable, and appre- 
ciative of life and its manifold blessings. One never sees a 
drunken man among them. The change that has come over 
our little party is surprising. Day by day we lose some of our 
restlessness and absorb some of the spirit of quietude and ease 
that is in the tranquil atmosphere about us and in the de- 
meanor of the people. We grow wise apace. We begin to 
comprehend what life is for. 

We nave had a bath in Milan, in a public bath-house. They 
were going to put all three of us in one bath-tub, but we ob- 
jected. Each of us had an Italian farm on his back. We 
could have felt affluent if we had been officially surveyed and 
fenced in. We chose to have three bath-tubs, and large one? 
— tubs suited to the dignity of aristocrats who had real estate, 
and brought it with them. After we were stripped and had 



188 "beware, womanI" 

taken the first chilly dash, we discovered that haunting atrocity 
that has embittered our lives in so many cities and villages of 
Italy and France — there was no soap. I called. A woman 
answered, and I barely had time to throw myself against the 
door — she would have been in, in another second. I said : 

" Beware, woman ! Go away from here — go away, now, or 
it will be the worse for you. I am an unprotected male, but I 
will preserve my honor at the peril of my life !" 

These words must have frightened her, for she skurried away 
very fast. 

Dan's voice rose on the air : 

" Oh, bring some soap, why don't you!" 

The reply was Italian. Dan resumed: 

" Soap, you know — soap. That is what I want — soap. 
S-o-a-p, soap ; s-o-p-e, soap ; s-o-u-p, soap. Hurry up ! I don't 
know how you Irish spell it, but I want it. Spell it to suit 
yourself, but fetch it. I'm freezing." 

I heard the doctor soy, impressively : 

"Dan, how often have we told you that these foreigners can 
not understand English ? Why will you not depend upon us ? 
"Why will you not tell us what you want, and let us ask for it 
in the language of the country ? It would save us a great deal 
of the humiliation your reprehensible ignorance causes us. I 
will address this person in his mother tongue : ' Here, cospetto ! 
corpo di Bacco ! Sacramento ! Solferino ! — Soap, you son of a 
gun !' Dan, if you would let us talk for yon, you would never 
expose your ignorant vulgarity." 

Even this fluent discharge of Italian did not bring the soap 
at once, but there was a good reason for it. There was not 
such an article about the establishment. It is my belief that 
there never had been. They had to send far up town, and to 
several different places before they finally got it, so they said. 
We had to wait twenty or thirty minutes. The same thing 
had occurred the evening before, at the hotel. I think I have 
divined the reason for this state of things at last. The Eng- 
lish know how to travel comfortably, and they carry soap with 
them ; other foreigners do not use the article. 



"NOTISH.' v 189 

At every hotel we stop at we always have to send out for 
soap, at the last moment, when we are grooming ourselves for 
dinner, and they put it in the bill along with the caDdles and 
other nonsense. In Marseilles they make half the fancy toilet 
soap we consume in America, but the Marseillaise only have a 
vague theoretical idea of its use, which they have obtained 
from books of travel, just as they have acquired an uncertain 
notion of clean shirts, and the peculiarities of the gorilla, and 
other curious matters. This reminds me of poor Blucher's 
note to the landlord in Paris : 

" Paris, le 1 Juillet. 
"Monsieur le Landlord — Sir: Pourquoi don't you mettez some savon in your bed- 
chambers ? Est-ce que vous pensez I will steal it? La nuit passe e you charged me 
pour deux chandeUes when I only had one ; hier vous avez charged me avec glace 
when I had none at all ; tout les jours you are coming some fresh game or other on 
me, mais vous ne pouvez pas play this savon dodge on me twice. Savon is a neces- 
sary de la vie to any body but a Frenchman, et je Vaurai hors de cet hotel or make 
trouble. Vou hear me. Attons. 

Blucher." 

I remonstrated against the sending of this note, because it 
was so mixed up that the landlord would never be able to 
make head or tail of it ; but Blucher said he guessed the old 
man could read the French of it and average the rest. 

Blucher's French is bad enough, but it is not much worse 
than the English one finds in advertisements all over Italy 
every day. For instance, observe the printed card of the hotel 
we shall probably stop at on the shores of Lake Como : 



"NOTISH." 
" This hotel which the best it is in Italy and most superb, 
is handsome locate on the best situation of the lake, with 
the most splendid view near the Villas Melzy, to the King 
of Belgian, and Serbelloni. This hotel have recently en- 
large, do offer all commodities on moderate price, at the 
strangers gentlemen who whish spend the seasons on the 
Lake Come." 



How is that, for a specimen ? In the hotel is a handsome 
little chapel where an English clergyman is employed to preach 
to such of the guests of the house as hail from England and 



190 AN ILLUSTRIOUS PAINTING. 

America, and this fact is also set forth in barbarous English in 
the same advertisement. Wouldn't you have supposed that the 
adventurous linguist who framed the card would have known 
enough to submit it to that clergyman before he sent it to the 
printer ? 

Here, in Milan, in an ancient tumble-down ruin of a church, 
is the mournful wreck of the most celebrated painting in the 
world — " The Last Supper," by Leonardo da Yinci. We are 
not infallible judges of pictures, but of course we went there 
to see this wonderful painting, once so beautiful, always so wor- 
shipped by masters in art, and forever to be famous in song 
and story. And the first thing that occurred was the infliction 
on us of a placard fairly reeking with wretched English. Take 
a morsel of it : 

" Bartholomew (that is the first figure on the left hand side at the spectator,) un- 
certain and doubtful about what he thinks to have heard, and upon which he wants 
to be assured by himself at Christ and by no others." 

Good, isn't it ? And then Peter is described as " argument- 
ing in a threatening and angrily condition at Judas Iscariot." 

This paragraph recalls the picture. " The Last Supper " is 
painted on the dilapidated wall of what was a little chapel 
attached to the main church in ancient times, I suppose. It is 
battered and scarred in every direction, and stained and discol- 
ored by time, and Napoleon's horses kicked the legs off most 
the disciples when they (the horses, not the disciples,) were sta- 
bled there more than half a century ago. 

I recognized the old picture in a moment — the Saviour with 
bowed head seated at the centre of a long, rough table with 
scattering fruits and dishes upon it, and six disciples on either 
side in their long robes, talking to each other — the picture from 
which all engravings and all copies have been made for three 
centuries. Perhaps no living man has ever known an attempt to 
paint the Lord's Supper differently. The world seems to have 
become settled in the belief, long ago, that it is not possible for 
human genius to outdo this creation of Da Yinci's. I suppose 
painters will go on copying it as long as any of the original is 



OLD MASTERS. 



191 



left visible to the eye. There were a dozen easels in the room, 
and as many artists transferring the great picture to their can- 
vases. Fifty proofs of steel engravings and lithographs were 
scattered around, too. And as usual, I could not help noticing 
how superior the copies were to the original, that is, to my in- 
experienced eye. Wherever you find a Raphael, a Rubens, a 
Michael Angelo, a Caracci, or a Da Yinci (and we see them 
every day,) you find artists copying them, and the copies are 
always the handsomest. May be the originals were handsome 
when they were new, but they are not now. 




This picture is about 

thirty feet long, and ten 

or twelve high, I should 

think, and the figures are 

at least life size. It is one of the largest paintings in Europe, 

The colors are dimmed with age : the countenances are scaled 



192 AMATEUR RAPTURES. 

and marred, and nearly all expression is gone from them; 
the hair is a dead blur upon the wall, and there is no life in the 
eyes. Only the attitudes are certain. 

People come here from all parts of the world, and glorify 
this masterpiece. They stand entranced before it with bated 
breath and parted lips, and when they speak, it is only in the 
catchy ejaculations of rapture : 

"O, wonderful!" 

" Such expression !" 

" Such grace of attitude !" 

" Such dignity !" 

" Such faultless drawing !" 

" Such matchless coloring !" 

" Such feeling !" 

" What delicacy of touch !" 

" What sublimity of conception !" 

" A vision ! a vision I" 

I only envy these people ; I envy them their honest admi- 
ration, if it be honest — their delight, if they feel delight. I 
harbor no animosity toward any of them. But at the same 
time the thought will intrude itself upon me, How can they 
see what is not visible ? What would you think of a man who 
looked at some decayed, blind, toothless, pock-marked Cleo- 
patra, and said: "What matchless beauty ! What soul ! What 
expression !" What would you think of a man who gazed 
upon a dingy, foggy sunset, and said : " What sublimity ! what 
feeling ! what richness of coloring !" What would you think 
of a man who stared in ecstacy upon a desert of stumps and 
said : " Oh, my soul, my beating heart, what a noble forest is 
here !" 

You would think that those men had an astonishing talent 
for seeing things that had already passed away. It was what 
I thought when I stood before the Last Supper and heard men 
apostrophizing wonders, and beauties and perfections which had 
faded out of the picture and gone, a hundred years before they 
were born. We can imagine the beauty that was once in an 
aged face ; we can imagine the forest if we see the stumps ; 



UNINSPIRED CRITICS 193 

but we can not absolutely see these things when they are not 
there. I am willing to believe that the eye of the practiced 
artist can rest npon the Last Supper and renew a lustre where 
only a hint of it is left, supply a tint that has faded away, re- 
store an expression that is gone; patch, and color, and add, to 
the dull canvas until at last its figures shall stand before him 
aglow with the life, the feeling, the freshness, yea, with all 
the noble beauty that was theirs when first they came from the 
hand of the master. But / can not work this miracle. Can 
those other uninspired visitors do it, or do they only happily 
imagine they do ? 

After reading so much about it, I am satisfied that the Last 
Supper was a very miracle of art once. But it was three hun- 
dred years ago. 

It vexes me to hear people talk so glibly of " feeling," " ex- 
pression," " tone," and those other easily acquired and inex- 
pensive technicalities of art that make such a fine show in 
conversations concerning pictures. There is not one man in 
seventy-five hundred that can tell what a pictured face is in- 
tended to express. There is not one man in five hundred that 
can go into a court-room and be sure that he will not mistake 
some harmless innocent of a juryman for the black-hearted 
assassin on trial. Yet such people talk of " character " and 
presume to interpret " expression " in pictures. There is an 
old story that Matthews, the actor, was once lauding the abil- 
ity of the human face to express the passions and emotions 
hidden in the breast. He said the countenance could disclose 
what was passing in the heart plainer than the tongue could. 

" Now," he said, " observe my face — what does it express V 9 

"Despair!" 

" Bah, it expresses peaceful resignation ! What does this 
express ?" 

" Eage !" 

" Stuff ! it means terror ! This /" 

" Imbecility !" 

" Fool ! It is smothered ferocity ! Now this /" 

"Joy!" 

13 



194 



PAINTING OF THE VIRGIN MARY, 



" Oh, perdition ! Any ass can see it means insanity !" 

Expression ! People coolly pretend to read it who would 

think themselves presumptuous if they pretended to interpret 

the hieroglyphics on the obelisks of Luxor — yet they are fully 

as competent to do the one thing as the other. I have heard 




FACIAL EXPRESSION. 



two very intelligent critics speak of Murillo's Immaculate Con- 
ception (now in the museum at Seville,) within the past few 
days. One said : 

" Oh, the Virgin's face is full of the ecstasy of a joy that is 
complete — that leaves nothing more to be desired on earth !" 

The other said : 

" Ah, that wonderful face is so humble, so pleading — it says 
as plainly as words could say it : ' I fear ; I tremble ; I am 
unworthy. But Thy will be done ; sustain Thou Thy ser- 
vant !' " 

The reader can see the picture in any drawing-room ; it can 
be easily recognized : the Virgin (the only young and really 
beautiful Virgin that was ever painted by one of the old mas- 
ters, some of us think,) stands in the crescent of the new moon, 
with a multitude of cherubs hovering about her, and more 
coming ; her hands are crossed upon her breast, and upon her 
uplifted countenance falls a glory out of the heavens. The 
reader may amuse himself, if he chooses, in trying to deter- 
mine which of these gentlemen read the Virgin's " expression " 
aright, or if either of them did it. 

Any one who is acquainted with the old masters will com- 
prehend how much the Last Supper is damaged when I say 
that the spectator can not really tell, now, whether the dis- 
ciples are Hebrews or Italians. These ancient painters never 



ITALY. — IN THE COUNTRY. 19& 

succeeded in denationalizing themselves. The Italian artists 
painted Italian Virgins, the Dutch painted Dutch Virgins, tho 
Yirgins of the French painters were Frenchwomen — none of 
them ever put into the face of the Madonna that indescribable 
something which proclaims the Jewess, whether you find her 
in New York, in Constantinople, in Paris, Jerusalem, or in the 
Empire of Morocco. I saw in the Sandwich Islands, once, a 
picture, copied by a talented German artist from an engraving 
in one of the American illustrated papers. It was an allegory, 
representing Mr. Davis in the act of signing a secession act or 
some such document. Over him hovered the ghost of Wash- 
ington in warning attitude, and in the background a troop of 
shadowy soldiers in Continental uniform were limping with 
shoeless, bandaged feet through a driving snow-storm. Valley 
Forge was suggested, of course. The copy seemed accurate,, 
and yet there was a discrepancy somewhere. After a long ex- 
amination I discovered what it was — the shadowy soldiers were- 
all Germans ! Jeff*. Davis was a German ! even the hovering 
ghost was a German ghost! The artist had unconsciously 
worked his nationality into the picture. To tell the truth, I 
am getting a little perplexed about John the Baptist and his 
portraits. In France I finally grew reconciled to him as a 
Frenchman; here he is unquestionably an Italian. What 
next ? Can it be possible that the painters make John the 
Baptist a Spaniard in Madrid and an Irishman in Dublin ? 

We took an open barouche and drove two miles out of Milan 
to " see ze echo," as the guide expressed it. The road was 
smooth, it was bordered by trees, fields, and grassy meadows, 
and the soft air was filled with the odor of flowers. Troops 
of picturesque peasant girls, coming from work, hooted at us, 
shouted at us, made all manner of game of us, and entirely 
delighted me. My long-cherished judgment was confirmed. 
I always did think those frowsy, romantic, unwashed peasant 
girls I had read so much about in poetry were a glaring fraud. 

We enjoyed our jaunt. It was an exhilarating relief from 
tiresome sight-seeing. 

We distressed ourselves very little about the astonishing 



196 



A WONDERFUL ECHO 



echo the guide talked so much about. We were growing 
accustomed to encomiums on wonders that too often proved no 
wonders at all. And so we were most happily disappointed to 
find in the sequel that the guide had even failed to rise to the 
magnitude of his subject. 

We arrived at a tumble-down old rookery called the Palazzo 
Simonetti — a massive hewn-stone affair occupied by a family 




THE ECHO. 

of ragged Italians. A good-looking young girl conducted us 
to a window on the second floor which looked out on a court 
walled on three sides by tall buildings. She put her head out 
at the window and shouted. The echo answered more times 
than we could count. She took a speaking trumpet and 
through it she shouted, sharp and quick, a single 

" Ha !" The echo answered : 

«Ha! ha! ha! ha!— ha!-ha! ha! h-a-a-a-a-a r 



A WONDERFUL ECHO, 



197 



and finally went off into a rollicking convulsion of the jolliest 
laughter that could be imagined. It was so joyful — so long 
continued — so perfectly cordial and hearty, that every body 
was forced to join in. There was no resisting it. 

Then the girl took a gun and fired it. We stood ready te 
count the astonishing clatter of reverberations. We could not 
say one, two, three, fast enough, but we could dot our note- 
books with our pencil points almost rapidly enough to take 
down a sort of short-hand report of the result. My page re- 
vealed the following account. I could not keep up, but I did 
as well as I could : 




FIFTY-TWO DISTINCT REPETITIONS. 



I set down fifty-two distinct repetitions, and then the echo 
got the advantage of me. The doctor set down sixty-four, and 
thenceforth the echo moved too fast for him, also. After the 
separate concussions could no longer be noted, the reverbera- 
tions dwindled to a wild, long-sustained clatter of sounds such 
as a watchman's rattle produces. It is likely that this is the 
most remarkable echo in the world. 



198 



A KISS FOR A FRANC. 



The doctor, in jest, offered to kiss the young girl, and was 

taken a little aback when 
she said he might for a franc ! 
The commonest gallantry 
compelled him to stand by 
his offer, and so he paid the 
franc and took the kiss. She 
was a philosopher. She said 
a franc was a good thing to 
have, and she did not care 
any thing for one paltry 
kiss, because she had a 
million left. Then our 
comrade, always a shrewd 
business man, offered to 
take the whole cargo at 
thirty days, but that little 




A KISS FOR A FRANC. 



financial scheme was a failure. 



CHAPTEE XX. 

~TTT"E left Milan by rail. The Cathedral six or seven miles 

▼ ▼ behind ns — vast, dreamy, blueish snow-clad mountains 
twenty miles in front of ns, — these were the accented points in 
the scenery. The more immediate scenery consisted of fields 
and farm-honses ontside the car and a monster-headed dwarf and 
a monstached woman inside it. These latter were not show- 
people. Alas, deformity and female beards are too common in 
Italy to attract attention. 

We passed through a range of wild, picturesque hills, steep, 
wooded, cone-shaped, with rugged crags projecting here and 
there, and with dwellings and ruinous castles perched away up 
toward the drifting clouds. We lunched at the curious old 
town of Como, at the foot of the lake, and then took the small 
steamer and had an afternoon's pleasure excursion to this 
place, — Bellaggio. 

When we walked ashore, a party of policemen (people whose 
cocked hats and showy uniforms would shame the finest uni- 
form in the military service of the United States,) put us into 
a little stone cell aud locked us in. We had the whole passen- 
ger list for company, but their room would have been prefer- 
able, for there was no light, there were no windows, no venti- 
lation. It was close and hot. We were much crowded. It 
was the Black Hole of Calcutta on a small scale. Presently 
a smoke rose about our feet — a smoke that smelt of all the 
dead things of earth, of all the putrefaction and corruption 
imaginable. 

We were there five minutes, and when we got out it was 
hard to tell which of us carried the vilest fragrance. 



200 

These miserable outcasts called that " fumigating " us, and 
the term was a tame one indeed. They fumigated us to guard 
themselves against the cholera, though we hailed from no in- 
fected port. We had left the cholera far behind us all the 
time. However, they must keep epidemics away somehow or 
other, and fumigation is cheaper than soap. They must either 
wash themselves or fumigate other people. Some of the lower 
classes had rather die than wash, but the fumigation of stran- 



THE FUMIGATION. 



gers causes them no pangs. They need no fumigation them- 
selves. Their habits make it unnecessary. They carry their 
preventive with them ; they sweat and fumigate all the day 
long. I trust I am a humble and a consistent Christian. I try 
to do what is right. I know it is my duty to " pray for them 
that despitefully use me ;" and therefore, hard as it is, I shall 
still try to pray for these fumigating, maccaroni-stuffing organ 
grinders. 



NIGHT BY THE LAKE OF COMO. 201 

Our hotel sits at the water's edge — at least its front garden 
does — and we walk among the shrubbery and smoke at twi- 
light ; we look afar off at Switzerland and the Alps, and feel 
an indolent willingness to look no closer ; we go down the 
steps and swim in the lake ; we take a shapely little boat and 
sail abroad among the reflections of the stars ; lie on the 
thwarts and listen to the distant laughter, the singing, the soft 
melody of flutes and guitars that comes floating across the wa- 
ter from pleasuring gondolas ; we close the evening with exas- 
perating billiards on one of those same old execrable tables. 
A midnight luncheon in our ample bed-chamber ; a final smoke 
in its contracted veranda facing the water, the gardens and the 
mountains ; a summing up of the day's events. Then to bed, 
with drowsy brains harassed with a mad panorama that mixes 
up pictures of France, of Italy, of the ship, of the ocean, of 
home, in grotesque and bewildering disorder. Then a melting 
away of familiar faces, of cities and of tossing waves, into a 
great calm of forgetfulness and peace. 

After which, the nightmare. 

Breakfast in the morning, and then the Lake. 

I did not like it yesterday. I thought Lake Tahoe was much 
finer. I have to confess now, however, that my judgment 
erred somewhat, though not extravagantly. I always had 
an idea that Como was a vast basin of water, like Tahoe, shut 
in by great mountains. Well, the border of huge mountains 
is here, but the lake itself is not a basin. It is as crooked as 
any brook, and only from one-quarter to two-thirds as wide as 
the Mississippi. There is not a yard of low ground on either 
side of it — nothing but>endless chains of mountains that spring 
abruptly from the water's edge, and tower to altitudes varying 
from a thousand to two thousand feet. Their craggy sides are 
clothed with vegetation, and white specks of houses peep out 
from the luxuriant foliage every where ; they are even perched 
upon jutting and picturesque pinnacles a thousand feet above 
your head. 

Again, for miles along the shores, handsome country seats, 
surrounded by gardens and groves, sit fairly in the water, some- 



202 



ITS SCENERY 



times in nooks carved by Nature out of the vine-hung preci- 
pices, and with no ingress or egress save by boats. Some have 
great broad stone staircases leading down to the water, with 
heavy stone balustrades ornamented with statuary and fanci- 
fully adorned with creeping vines and bright-colored flowers — 
for all the world like a drop-curtain in a theatre, and lacking 
nothing but long-waisted, high-heeled women and j lumed 
gallants in silken tights coming down to go serenading in the 
splendid gondola in waiting. 




LAKE COMO. 



A great feature of Como's attractiveness is the multitude of 
pretty houses and gardens that cluster upon its shores and on 
its mountain sides. They look so snug and so homelike, and 
at eventide when every thing seems to slumber, and the music 
of the vesper bells comes stealing over the water, one almost 
believes that nowhere else than on the Lake of Como can there 
be found such a paradise of tranquil repose. 



ITS SCENERY. 203 

From my window here in Bellaggio, I have a view of the 
ether side of the lake now, which is as beautiful as a picture. 
A scarred and wrinkled precipice rises to a height of eighteen 
hundred feet ; on a tiny bench half way up its vast wall, sits a 
little snow-flake of a church, no bigger than a martin-box, ap- 
parently ; skirting the base of the cliff are a hundred orange 
groves and gardens, flecked with glimpses of the white dwell- 
ings that are buried in them ; in front, three or four gondolas 
lie idle upon the water — and in the burnished mirror of the 
lake, mountain, chapel, houses, groves and boats are counter- 
feited so brightly and so clearly that one scarce knows where 
the reality leaves off and the reflection begins ! 

The surroundings of this picture are fine. A mile away, a 
grove-plumed promontory juts far into the lake and glasses its 
palace in the blue depths ; in midstream a boat is cutting the 
shining surface and leaving a long track behind, like a ray of 
light ; the mountains beyond are veiled in a dreamy purple 
haze ; far in the opposite direction a tumbled mass of domes 
and verdant slopes and valleys bars the lake, and here indeed 
does distance lend enchantment to the view — for on this broad 
canvas, sun and clouds and the richest of atmospheres have 
blended a thousand tints together, and over its surface the 
filmy lights and shadows drift, hour after hour, and glorify it 
with a beauty that seems reflected out of Heaven itself. Be- 
yond all question, this is the most voluptuous scene we have 
yet looked upon. 

Last night the scenery was striking and picturesque. On the 
other side crags and trees and snowy houses were reflected in 
the lake with a wonderful distinctness, and streams of light 
from many a distant window shot far abroad over the still wa- 
ters. On this side, near at hand, great mansions, white with 
moonlight, glared out from the midst of masses of foliage that 
lay black and shapeless in the shadows that fell from the cliff 
above — and down in the margin of the lake every feature of 
the weird vision was faithfully repeated. 

To-day we have idled through a wonder of a garden attached 
to a ducal estate — but enough of description is enough, I judge. 



204 COMO COMPARED WITH TAHOE. 

I suspect that this was the same place the gardener's son de- 
ceived the Lady of Lyons with, but I do not know. You maj 
have heard of the passage somewhere : 

u A deep vale, 
Shut out by Alpine hills from the rude world, 
Near a clear lake margined br fruits of gold 
And whispering myrtles : 
Glassing softest skies, cloudless, 
Save with rare and roseate shadows ; 
A palace, lifting to eternal heaven its marbled walls, 
From out a glossj bower of coolest foliage musical with birds." 

That is all very well, except the "clear" part of the lake. 
It certainly is clearer than a great many lakes, but how dull 
its waters are compared with the wonderful transparence of 
Lake Tahoe ! I speak of the north shore of Tahoe, where one 
can count the scales on a trout at a depth of a hundred and 
eighty feet. I have tried to get this statement off at par here, 
but with no success ; so I have been obliged to negotiate it at 
fifty per cent, discount. At this rate I find some takers ; per- 
haps the reader will receive it on the same terms — ninety feet 
instead of one hundred and eighty. But let it be remembered 
that those are forced terms — Sheriff's sale prices. As far as I 
am privately concerned, I abate not a jot of the original asser- 
tion that in those strangely magnifying waters one may count 
the scales on a trout (a trout of the large kind,) at a depth of 
a hundred and eighty feet — may see every pebble on the bot- 
tom — might even count a paper of dray-pins. People talk of 
the transparent waters of the Mexican Bay of Acapulco, but in 
my own experience I know they can not compare with those I am 
speaking of. I have fished for trout, in Tahoe, and at a meas- 
ured depth of eighty-four feet I have seen them put their noses to 
the bait and I could see their gills open and shut. I could hardly 
have seen the trout themselves at that distance in the open air. 

As I go back in spirit and recall that noble sea, reposing 
among the snow-peaks six thousand feet above the ocean, the 
conviction comes strong upon me again that Como would only 
seem a bedizened little courtier in that august presence. 



COMO COMPARED WITH TAHOE. 205 

Sorrow and misfortune overtake the Legislature that still 
from year to year permits Tahoe to retain its unmusical cogno- 
men ! Tahoe ! It suggests no crystal waters, no picturesque 
shores, no sublimity. Tahoe for a sea in the clouds : a sea that 
has character, and asserts it in solemn calms, at times, at times 
in savage storms ; a sea, whose royal seclusion is guarded by a 
cordon of sentinel peaks that lift their frosty fronts nine thou- 
sand feet above the level world ; a sea whose every aspect is 
impressive, whose belongings are all beautiful, whose lonely 
majesty types the Deity ! 

Tahoe means grasshoppers. It means grasshopper soup. 
It is Indian, and suggestive of Indians. They say it is Pi-ute— 
possibly it is Digger. I am satisfied it was named by the Dig- 
gers — those degraded savages who roast their dead relatives, 
then mix the human grease and ashes of bones with tar, and 
"gaum" it thick all over their heads and foreheads and ears, 
and go caterwauling about the hills and call it mourning. 
These are the gentry that named the Lake. 

People say that Tahoe means ''Silver Lake" — "Limpid "Wa- 
ter" — "Falling Leaf." Bosh. It means grasshopper soup, 
the favorite dish of the Digger tribe — and of the Pi-utes as 
well. It isn't worth while, in these practical times, for people 
to talk about Indian poetry — there never was any in them — 
except in the Fennimore Cooper Indians. But they are an ex- 
tinct tribe that never existed. I know the Noble Red Man. 
I have camped with the Indians ; I have been on the war- 
path with them, taken part in the chase with them — for grass- 
hoppers ; helped them steal cattle ; I have roamed with them, 
scalped them, had them for breakfast. I would gladly eat the 
whole race if I had a chance. 

But I am growing unreliable. I will return to my compari- 
son of the Lakes. Como is a little deeper than Tahoe, if peo- 
ple here tell the truth. They say it is eighteen hundred feet 
deep at this point, but it does not look a dead enough blue for 
that. Tahoe is one thousand five hundred and twenty-five 
feet deep in the centre, by the State Geologist's measurement. 
They say the great peak opposite this town is five thousand 



206 MEETING A SHIPMATE. 

feet high : but I feel sure that three thousand feet of that state- 
ment is a good honest lie. The lake is a mile wide, here, and 
maintains about that width from this point to its northern ex- 
tremity — which is distant sixteen miles : from here to its south- 
ern extremity — say fifteen miles — it is not over half a mile 
wide in any place, I should think. Its snow-clad mountains 
one hears so much about are only seen occasionally, and then 
in the distance, the Alps. Tahoe is from ten to eighteen miles 
wide, and its mountains shut it in like a wall. Their summits 
are never free from snow the year round. One thing about it 
is very strange : it never has even a skim of ice upon its sur- 
face, although lakes in the same range of mountains, lying in 
a lower and warmer temperature, freeze over in winter. 

It is cheerful to meet a shipmate in these out-of-the-way 
places and compare notes with him. We have found one of 
ours here — an old soldier of the war, who is seeking bloodless 
adventures and rest from his campaigns, in these sunny lands.* 

* Col. J. Heron Poster, editor of a Pittsburgh journal, and a most estimable 
gentleman. As these sheets are being prepared for the press, I am pained to learn 
of his decease shortly after his return home. — M. T. 



CHAPTEE XXI 



"TTTE voyaged by steamer down the Lago di Lecco, through 
▼ ▼ wild mountain scenery, and by hamlets and villas, 
and disembarked at the town of Lecco. They said it was two 
hours, by carriage to the ancient city of Bergamo, and that we 
would arrive there in good season for the railway train. We 
got an open barouche and a wild, boisterous driver, and set 
out. It was delightful. We had a fast team and a perfectly 
smooth road. There were towering cliffs on our left, and the 
pretty Lago di Lecco on our right, and every now and then it 
rained on us. Just before starting, the driver picked up, in 
the street, a stump of a cigar an inch long, and put it in his 
mouth. When he had carried it thus about an hour, I thought 
it would be only Christian charity to give him a light. I 
handed him my cigar, 
which I had just 
lit, and he put it in 
his mouth and re- 
turned his stump to 
his pocket ! I never 
saw a more sociable 
man. At least I 
never saw a man 
who was more socia- 
ble on a short ac- 
quaintance. SOCIAL DRIVER. 

We saw interior 
Italy, now. The houses were of solid stone, and not often in 
good repair. The peasants and their children were idle, as 




208 



BLOODY SHRINES. 



a general tiring, and the donkeys and chickens made them- 
selves at home in drawing-room and bed-chamber and were 
not molested. The drivers of each and every one of the 
slow-moving market-carts we met were stretched in the sun 
npon their merchandise, sound asleep. Every three or four 
hundred yards, it seemed to me, we came upon the shrine of 
some saint or other — a rude picture of him built into .a huge 
cross or a stone pillar by the road-side. — Some of the pic- 
tures of the Saviour were curiosities in their way. They 

represented him stretch- 
ed upon the cross, his 
countenance distorted 
with agony. From the 
wounds of the crown 
of thorns ; from the pier- 
ced side ; from the mu- 
tilated hands and feet; 
from the scourged body 
— from every hand- 
breadth of his person 
streams of blood were 
flowing! Such a gory, 
ghastly spectacle would 
frighten the children out 
of their senses, I should 
think. There were some 
unique auxiliaries to the 
painting which added 
to its spirited effect. 
These were genuine 
wooden and iron imple- 
ments, and were prominently disposed round about the figure : 
a bundle of nails ; the hammer to drive them ; the sponge ; 
the reed that supported it; the cup of vinegar; the ladder 
for the ascent of the cross ; the spear that pierced the Saviour's 
side. The crown of thorns was made of real thorns, and was 
nailed to the sacred head. In some Italian church-paintings, 




WAYSIDE SHRINE. 



HEART AND HOME OF PRIESTCRAFT. 



209 



even by the old masters, the Saviour and the Virgin wear silver 
or gilded crowns that are fastened to the pictured head with 
nails. The effect is as grotesque as it is incongruous. 

Here and there, on the fronts of roadside inns, we found 
huge, coarse frescoes of suffering martyrs like those in the 
shrines. It could not have diminished their sufferings any to 
be so uncouthly represented. We were in the heart and 
home of priestcraft — of a happy, cheerful, contented ignorance, 
superstition, degradation, poverty, indolence, and everlasting 
unaspiring worthlessness. And we said fervently, It suits 
these people precisely ; let them enjoy it, along with the other 
animals, and Heaven forbid that they be molested. We feel 
no malice toward these fumigators. 

We passed through the strangest, funniest, undreampt-of 
old towns, wedded to the customs and steeped in the dreams 
of the elder ages, and perfectly unaware that the world turns 
round ! And perfectly indifferent, too, as to whether it turns 
around or stands still. They have nothing to do but eat and 
sleep and sleep and eat, and toil a little when they can get a 
friend to stand by and keep them awake. They are not paid 
for thinking — they are not paid to fret about the world's con- 
cerns. They were 
not respectable peo- 
ple — they were not 
worthy people — 
they were not learn- 
ed and wise and 
brilliant people — 
but in their breasts, 
all their stupid lives 
long, resteth a peace 
that passeth under- 
standing ! How can 
men, calling them- 
selves men, consent to be so degraded and happy. 

We whisked by many a gray old medieval castle, clad thick 
with ivy that swung its green banners down from towers and tur- 

14 




PEACE AND HAPPINESS. 



210 



THRILLING MEDIEVAL ROMANCES 



rets where once some old Crusader's flag had floated. The driver 
pointed to one of these ancient fortresses, and said, (I translate) : 

" Do you see that great iron hook that projects from the 
wall just under the highest window in the ruined tower ?" 

We said we could not see it at such a distance, but had no 
doubt it was there. 

" Well," he said, " there is a legend connected with that 




CASTLE OF COUNT LUIGI. 



iron hook. Nearly seven hundred years ago, that castle was 
the property of the noble Count Luigi Gennaro Guido Al- 
phonso di Gen ova — " 

" What was his other name ?" said Dan. 



THRILLING MEDIEVAL ROMANCE. 211 

" He had no other name. The name I have spoken was all 
the name he had. He was the son of — " 

" Poor but honest parents — that is all right — never mind the 
particulars — go on with the legend." 

THE LEGEND. 

Well, then, all the world, at that time, was in a wild excite- 
ment about the Holy Sepulchre. All the great feudal lords in 
Europe were pledging their lands and pawning their plate to 
fit out men-at-arms so that they might join the grand armies 
of Christendom and win renown in the Holy Wars. The 
Count Luigi raised money, like the rest, and one mild Septem- 
ber morning, armed with battle-ax, portcullis and thundering 
eulverin, he rode through the greaves and bucklers of his 
donjon-keep with as gallant aHroop of Christian bandits as ever 
stepped in Italy. He had his sword, Excalibur, with him. 
His beautiful countess and her young daughter waved him a 
tearful adieu from the battering-rams and buttresses of the 
fortress, and he galloped away with a happy heart. 

He made a raid on a neighboring baron and completed his 
outfit with the booty secured. He then razed the castle to the 
ground, massacred the family and moved on. They were 
hardy fellows in the grand old days of chivalry. Alas ! those 
days will never come again. 

Count Luigi grew high in fame in Holy Land. He plunged 

into the carnage of a hundred battles, but his good Excalibur 

always brought him out alive, albeit often sorely wounded. 

His face became browned by exposure to the Syrian sun in 

long marches; he suffered hunger and thirst; he pined in 

prisons, he languished in loathsome plague-hospitals. And 

many and many a time he thought of his loved ones at home, 

and wondered if all was well with them. But his heart said, 

Peace, is not thy brother watching over thy household ? 
* * * * # * * 

Forty-two years waxed and waned ; the good fight was won ; 

Godfrey reigned in Jerusalem — the Christian hosts reared the 

fanner of the cross above the Holy Sepulchre ! 



212 THRILLING MEDIEVAL ROMANCE. 

Twilight was approaching. Fifty harlequins, in flowing 
robes, approached this castle wearily, for they were on foot, 
and the dust upon their garments betokened that they had 
traveled far. They overtook a peasant, and asked him if it 
were likely they could get food and a hospitable bed there, for 
love of Christian charity, and if perchance, a moral parlor 
entertainment might meet with generous countenance — " for," 
said they, " this exhibition hath no feature that could offend 
the most fastidious taste." 

" Marry," quoth the peasant, " an' it please your worships, 
ye had better journey many a good rood hence with your 
juggling circus than trust your bones in yonder castle." 

" How now, sirrah !" exclaimed the chief monk, " explain 
thy ribald speech, or by'r Lady it shall go hard with thee." 

" Peace, good mountebank, I did but utter the truth that 
was in my heart. San Paolo be my witness that did ye but find 
the stout Count Leonardo in his cups, sheer from the castle's 
topmost battlements would he hurl ye all ! Alack-a-day, the 
good Lord Luigi reigns not here in these sad times." 

"The good Lord Luigi?" 

" Aye, none other, please your worship. In his day, the 
poor rejoiced in plenty and the rich he did oppress ; taxes were 
not known, the fathers of the church waxed fat upon his 
bounty ; travelers went and came, with none to interfere ; and 
whosoever would, might tarry in his halls in cordial welcome, 
and eat his bread and drink his wine, withal. But woe is 
me ! some two and forty years agone the good count rode 
hence to fight for Holy Cross, and many a year hath flown 
since word or token have we had of him. Men say his bones 
lie bleaching in the fields of Palestine." 

"And now?" 

" Now ! God 'a mercy, the cruel Leonardo lords it in the 
castle. He wrings taxes from the poor ; he robs all travelers 
that journey by his gates ; he spends his days in feuds and 
murders, and his nights in revel and debauch ; he roasts the 
fathers of the church upon his kitchen spits, and enjoyeth the 
•ame, calling it pastime. These thirty years Luigi's countesi 



THRILLING MEDIEVAL ROMANCE. 215 

t 

hath not been seen by any he in all this land, and many whisper 
that she pines in the dungeons of the castle for that she will 
not wed with Leonardo, saying her dear lord still liveth and 
that she will die ere she prove false to him. They whisper 
likewise that her daughter is a prisoner as well. Nay, good 
jugglers, seek ye refreshment other wheres. 'Twere better 
that ye perished in a Christian way than that ye plunged from 
off yon dizzy tower. Give ye good-day." 

" God keep ye, gentle knave — farewell." 

But heedless of the peasant's warning, the players moved 
straightway toward the castle. 

Word was brought to Count Leonardo that a company of 
mountebanks besought his hospitality. 

" Tis well. Dispose of them in the customary manner. 
Yet stay! I have need of them. Let them come hither. 
Later, cast them from the battlements — or — how many priests 
have ye on hand ?" 

" The day's results are meagre, good my lord. An abbot 
and a dozen beggarly friars is all we have." 

" Hell and furies ! Is the estate going to seed ? Send hither 
the mountebanks. Afterward, broil them with the priests." 

The robed and close-cowled harlequins entered. The grim 
Leonardo sate in state at the head of his council board. 
Ranged up and down the hall on either hand stood near a 
hundred men-at-arms. 

"Ha, villains !" quoth the count, "What can ye do to earn 
the hospitality ye crave." 

" Dread lord and mighty, crowded audiences have greeted 
our humble efforts with rapturous applause. Among our 
body count we the versatile and talented Ugolino ; the justly 
celebrated Rodolpho ; the gifted and accomplished Roderigo ; 
the management have spared neither pains nor expense — " 

" S'death ! what can ye do ? Curb thy prating tongue." 

" Good my lord, in acrobatic feats, in practice with the 
dumb-bells, in balancing and ground and lofty tumbling are 
we versed — and sith your highness asketh me, I venture here 
to publish that in the truly marvelous and entertaining Zam- 
pillaerostation — " 



214: THRILLING MEDIEVAL ROMANCE. 

" Gag him ! throttle him ! Body of Bacchus ! am I a dog 
that I am to be assailed with polysyllabled blasphemy like to 
this ? But hold ! Lucretia, Isabel, stand forth ! Sirrah, behold 
this dame, this weeping wench. The first I marry, within the 
hour; the other shall dry her tears or feed the vultures. 
Thou and thy vagabonds shall crown the wedding with thy 
merry-makings. Fetch hither the priest !" 

The dame sprang toward the chief player. 

" O, save me !" she cried ; " save me from a fate far worse 
than death ! Behold these sad eyes, these sunken cheeks, 
this withered frame ! See thou the 'wreck this fiend hath 
made, and let thy heart be moved with pity ! Look upon this 
damosel ; note her wasted form, her halting step, her bloomless 
cheeks where youth should blush and happiness exult in 
smiles ! Hear us and have compassion. This monster was 
my husband's brother. He who should have been our shield 
against all harm, hath kept us shut within the noisome caverns 
of his donjon-keep for lo these thirty years. And for what 
crime ? None other than that I would not belie my troth, 
root out my strong love for him who marches with the legions 
of the cross in Holy Land, (for O, he is not dead !) and wed 
with him ! Save us, O, save thy persecuted suppliants !" 

She flung herself at his feet and clasped his knees. 
• " Ha !-ha !-ha !" shouted the brutal Leonardo. "Priest, to 
thy work !" and he dragged the weeping dame from her 
refuge. " Say, once for all, will you be mine ? — for by my 
halidome, that breath that uttereth thy refusal shall be thy last 
on earth I" 

"Ne-ver?" 

" Then die !" and the sword leaped from its scabbard. 

Quicker than thought, quicker than the lightning's flash, 
fifty monkish habits disappeared, and fifty knights in splendid 
armor stood revealed ! fifty falchions gleamed in air above the 
men-at-arms, and brighter, fiercer than them all, flamed Excal- 
ibur aloft, and cleaving downward struck the brutal Leonardo^ 
weapon from his grasp ! 

" A Luigi to the rescue ! Whoop !" 



THE BIRTHPLACE OF HARLEQUIN 



21ft 



" A Leonardo ! tare an ouns !" 

" Oh, God, Oh, God, my husband !" 

" Oh, God, Oh, God, my wife !" 

"My father!" 

" My precious !" [Tableau.] 

Count Luigi bound his usurping brother hand and foot. 
The practiced knights from 
Palestine made holy day sport 
of carving the awkward men- 
at-arms into chops and steaks. 
The victory was complete. 
Happiness reigned. The 
knights all married the daugh- 
ter. Joy! wassail! finis! 

" But what did they do with 
the wicked brother ?" 

" Oh nothing — only hanged 
him on that iron hook I was 
speaking of. By the chin." 

"As how?" 

"Passed it up through his 
gills into his mouth." 

" Leave him there ?" 

" Couple of years." 

" Ah— is— is he dead ?" 

" Six hundred and fifty years ago, or such a matter." 

" Splendid legend — splendid lie — drive on." 

We reached the quaint old fortified city of Bergamo, the 
renowned in history, some three-quarters of an hour before the 
train was ready to start. The place has thirty or forty thou- 
sand inhabitants and is remarkable for being the birthplace 
of harlequin. When we discovered that, that legend of our 
driver took to itself a new interest in our eyes. 

Bested and refreshed, we took the rail happy and contented. 
I shall not tarry to speak of the handsome Lago di Gardi ; 
its stately castle that holds in its stony bosom the secrets of 
an age so remote that even tradition goeth not back to it ; 




WICKED BROTHER. 



216 APPROACHING VENICE. 

the imposing mountain scenery that ennobles the landscape 
thereabouts ; nor yet of ancient Padua or haughty Yerona ; 
nor of their Montagues and Capulets, their famous balco- 
nies and tombs of Juliet and Romeo ct al,, but hurry straight 
to the ancient city of the sea, the widowed bride of the 
Adriatic. It was a long, long ride. But toward evening, as 
we sat silent and hardly conscious of where we were — sub- 
dued into that meditative calm that comes so surely after a 
conversational storm — some one shouted — 

" Venice !" 

And sure enough, afloat on the placid sea a league away, 
lay a great city, with its towers and domes and steeples drow- 
sing in a golden mist of sunset. 



CHAPTER XXII. 

THIS Venice, which was a haughty, invincible, magnificent 
Kepublic for nearly fourteen hundred years ; whose ar- 
mies compelled the world's applause whenever and wherever 
they battled ; whose navies well nigh held dominion of the 
6eas, and whose merchant fleets whitened the remotest oceans 
with their sails and loaded these piers with the products of 
every clime, is fallen a prey to poverty, neglect and melancholy 
decay. Six hundred years ago, Yenice was the Autocrat of 
Commerce ; her mart was the great commercial centre, the dis- 
tributing-house from whence the enormous trade of the Orient 
was spread abroad over the Western world. To-day her piers 
are deserted, her warehouses are empty, her merchant fleets 
are vanished, her armies and her navies are but memories. 
Her glory is departed, and with her crumbling grandeur of 
wharves and palaces about her she sits among her stagnant 
lagoons, forlorn and beggared, forgotten of the world. She that 
in her palmy days commanded the commerce of a hemisphere 
and made the weal or woe of nations with a beck of her puis- 
sant finger, is become the humblest among the peoples of the 
earth, — a peddler of glass beads for women, and trifling toys 
and trinkets for school-girls and children. 

The venerable Mother of the Republics is scarce a fit subject 
for flippant speech or the idle gossipping of tourists. It seems 
a sort of sacrilege to disturb the glamour of old romance that 
pictures her to us softly from afar off as through a tinted mist, 
and curtains her ruin and her desolation from our view. One 
ought, indeed, to turn away from her rags, her poverty and 
her humiliation, and think of her only as she was when sh© 



218 IN SACKCLOTH AND ASHES. 

sunk the fleets of Charlemagne ; when she humbled Frederick 
Barbarossa or waved her victorious banners above the battle- 
ments of Constantinople. 

We reached Venice at eight in the evening, and entered a 
hearse belonging to the Grand Hotel d'Europe. At any rate, 
it was more like a hearse than any thing else, though to speak 
by the card, it was a gondola. And this was the storied 'gon- 
dola of Yenice ! — the fairy boat in which the princely cavaliers 
of the olden time were wont to cleave the waters of the moon- 
lit canals and look the eloquence of love into the soft eyes of 
patrician beauties, while the gay gondolier in silken doublet 
touched his guitar and sang as only gondoliers can sing ! This 
the famed gondola and this the gorgeous gondolier ! — the one 
an inky, rusty old canoe with a sable hearse-body clapped on to 
the middle of it, and the other a mangy, barefooted gutter- 
snipe with a portion of his raiment on exhibition which should 
have been sacred from public scrutiny. Presently, as he turned 
a corner and shot his hearse into a dismal ditch between two 
long rows of towering, untenanted buildings, the gay gondolier 
began to sing, true to the traditions of his race. I stood it a 
little while. Then I said : 

" Now, here, Roderigo Gonzales Michael Angelo, I'm a pil- 
grim, and I'm a stranger, but I am not going to have my feel- 
ings lacerated by any such caterwauling as that. If that goes 
on, one of us has got to take water. It is enough that my 
cherished dreams of Yenice have been blighted forever as to 
the romantic gondola and the gorgeous gondolier ; this system 
of destruction shall go no farther; I will accept the hearse, 
under protest, and you may fly your flag of truce in peace, but 
here I register a dark and bloody oath that you shan't sing. 
Another yelp, and overboard you go." 

I began to feel that the old Yenice of song and story had 
departed forever. But I was too hasty. In a few minutes we 
swept gracefully out into the Grand Canal, and under the mel- 
low moonlight the Yenice of poetry and romance stood re- 
vealed. Right from the water's edge rose long lines of stately 
palaces of marble ; gondolas were gliding swiftly hither and 



THE GRAND FETE BY MOONLIGHT. 219 

thither and disappearing suddenly through unsuspected gates 
and alleys ; ponderous stone bridges threw their shadows 
athwart the glittering waves. There was life and motion every- 
where, and yet everywhere there was a hush, a stealthy sort 
of stillness, that was suggestive of secret enterprises of bravoes 
and of lovers ; and clad half in moonbeams and half in mys- 
terious shadows, the grim old mansions of the Republic seemed 
to have an expression about them of having an eye out for just 
iuch enterprises as these at that same moment. Music came 
floating over the waters — Venice was complete. 

It was a beautiful picture — very soft and dreamy and beau- 
tiful. But what was this Venice to compare with the Venice 
of midnight ? Nothing. There was a fete — a grand fete in 
honor of some saint who had been instrumental in checking 
the cholera three hundred years ago, and all Venice was abroad 
on the water. It was no common affair, for the Venetians did 
not know how soon they might need the saint's services again, 
now that the cholera was spreading every where. So in one 
vast space — say a third of a mile wide and two miles long — 
were collected two thousand gondolas, and every one of them 
had from two to ten, twenty and even thirty colored lanterns 
suspended about it, and from four to a dozen occupants. Just 
as far as the eye could reach, these painted lights were massed 
together — like a vast garden of many-colored flowers, except 
that these blossoms were never still ; they were ceaselessly gli- 
ding in and out, and mingling together, and seducing you into 
bewildering attempts to follow then* mazy evolutions. Here 
and there a strong red, green, or blue glare from a rocket that 
was struggling to get away, splendidly illuminated all the boats 
around it. Every gondola that swam by us, with its crescents 
and pyramids and circles of colored lamps hung aloft, and 
lighting up the faces of the young and the sweet-scented and 
lovely below, was a picture ; and the reflections of those lights, 
so long, so slender, so numberless, so many-colored and so dis- 
torted and wrinkled by the waves, was a picture likewise, and 
one that was enchantingly beautiful. Many and many a party 
•f young ladies and gentlemen had their state gondolas hand- 



220 



THE GRAND FETE BY MOONLIGHT. 



somely decorated, and ate supper on board, bringing their 
swallow-tailed, white-cravatted varlets to wait upon them, and 
having their tables tricked out as if for a bridal supper. They 
had brought along the costly globe lamps from their drawing- 
rooms, and the lace and silken curtains from the same places, 
I suppose. And they had also brought pianos and guitars, and 
they played and sang operas, while the plebeian paper-lan- 
terned gondolas from the suburbs and the back alleys crowded 
around to stare and listen. 

There was music every where — chorusses, string bands, brass 
bands, flutes, every thing. I was so surrounded, walled in, 
with music, magnificence and loveliness, that I became inspired 
with the spirit of the scene, and sang one tune myself. How- 
ever, when I observed that the other gondolas had sailed away, 
and my gondolier was preparing to go overboard, I stopped. 




DISGUSTED GONDOLIER. 



The f6te was magnificent. They kept it up the whole night 
long, and I never enjoyed myself better than I did while it 
lasted. 

What a funny old city this Queen of the Adriatic is ! Nar- 
row streets, vast, gloomy marble palaces, black with the cor- 
roding damps of centuries, and all partly submerged ; no dry 



VENICE BY MOONLIGHT. 221 

land visible any where, and no sidewalks worth mentioning ; 
if you want to go to church, to the theatre, or to the restau- 
rant, you must call a gondola. It must be a paradise for crip- 
ples, for verily a man has no use for legs here. 

For a day or two the place looked so like an overflowed Ar- 
kansas town, because of its currentless waters laving the very 
doorsteps of all the houses, and the cluster of boats made fast 
under the windows, or skimming in and out of the alleys and 
by-ways, that I could not get rid of the impression that there 
was nothing the matter here but a spring freshet, and that the 
river would fall in a few weeks and leave a dirty high-water 
mark on the houses, and the streets full of mud and rubbish. 

In the glare of day, there is little poetry about Venice, but 
under the charitable moon her stained palaces are white again, 
their battered sculptures are hidden in shadows, and the old 
city seems crowned once more with the grandeur that was hers 
five hundred years ago. It is easy, then, in fancy, to people 
these silent canals with plumed gallants and fair ladies — with 
Shylocks in gaberdine and sandals, venturing loans upon the 
rich argosies of Yenetian commerce — with Othellos and Des- 
demonas, with Iagos and Eoderigos — with noble fleets and vic- 
torious legions returning from the wars. In the treacherous 
sunlight we see Yenice decayed, forlorn, poverty-stricken, and 
commerceless — forgotten and utterly insignificant. But in the 
moonlight, her fourteen centuries of greatness fiing their glo- 
ries about her, and once more is she the princeliest among the 
nations of the earth. 

" There is a glorious city in the sea ; 
The sea is in the broad, the narrow streets, 
Ebbing and flowing ; and the salt-sea weed 
Clings to the marble of her palaces. 
No track of men, no footsteps to and fro, 
Lead to her gates I The path lies o'er the sea, 
Invisible : and from the land we went, 
As to a floating city — steering in, 
And gliding up her streets, as in a dream, 
i So smoothly, silently — by many a dome, 

Mosque-like, and many a stately portico, 
The statues ranged along an azure sky; 



222 NOTABLE PLACES. 

By many a pile, in more than Eastern pride, 

Of old the residence of merchant kings; 

The fronts of some, tho' time had shatter'd them, 

Still glowing with the richest hues of art, 

As tho' the wealth within them had run o'er." 

What would one naturally wish to see first in Venice ! The 
Bridge of Sighs, of course — and next the Church and th« 
Great Square of St. Mark, the Bronze Horses, and the famoui 
Lion of St. Mark. 

We intended to go to the Bridge of Sighs, but happened into 
the Ducal Palace first — a building which necessarily figures 
largely in Venetian poetry and tradition. In the Senate 
Chamber of the ancient Republic we wearied our eyes with 
staring at acres of historical paintings by Tintoretto and Paul 
Veronese, but nothing struck us forcibly except the one thing 
that strikes all strangers forcibly — a black square in the midst 
of a gallery of portraits. In one long row, around the great 
hall, were painted the portraits of the Doges of Venice (ven- 
erable fellows, with flowing white beards, for of the three hun- 
dred Senators eligible to the office, the oldest was usually 
chosen Doge,) and each had its complimentary inscription 
attached — till you came to the place that should have had Ma- 
rino Faliero's picture in it, and that was blank and black — 
blank, except that it bore a terse inscription, saying that the 
conspirator had died for his crime. It seemed cruel to keep that 
pitiless inscription still staring from the walls after the unhappy 
wretch had been in his grave irve hundred years. 

At the head of the Giant's Staircase, where Marino Faliero 
was beheaded, and where the Doges were crowned in ancient 
times, two small slits in the stone wall were pointed out — two 
harmless, insignificant orifices that would never attract a stran- 
ger's attention — yet these were the terrible Lions' Mouths! 
The heads were gone (knocked off by the French during their 
occupation of Venice,) but these were the throats, down which 
went the anonymous accusation, thrust in secretly at dead of 
night by an enemy, that doomed many an innocent man to 
walk the Bridge of Sighs and descend into the dungeon which 



COUNCIL OF THREE. 223 

none entered and hoped to see the sun again. This was in the 
old days when the Patricians alone governed Yenice — the 
common herd had no vote and no voice. There were one 
thousand five hundred Patricians ; from these, three hundred 
Senators were chosen ; from the Senators a Doge and a Coun- 
cil of Ten were selected, and by secret ballot the Ten chose 
from their own number a Council of Three. All these were 
Government spies, then, and every spy was under surveillance 
himself — men spoke in whispers in Yenice, and no man trusted 
his neighbor — not always his own brother. No man knew 
who the Council of Three were — not even the Senate, not even 
the Doge ; the members of that dread tribunal met at night in 
a chamber to themselves, masked, and robed from head to foot 
in scarlet cloaks, and did not even know each other, unless by 
voice. It was their duty to judge heinous political crimes, and 
from their sentence there was no appeal. A nod to the exe- 
cutioner was sufficient. The doomed man was marched down 
a hall and out at a door-way into the covered Bridge of Sighs, 
through it and into the dungeon and unto his death. At no 
time in his transit was he visible to any save his conductor. If 
a man had an enemy in those old days, the cleverest thing he 
could do was to slip a note for the Council of Three into the 
Lion's mouth, saying " This man is plotting against the Gov- 
ernment." If the awful Three found no proof, ten to one they 
would drown him anyhow, because he was a deep rascal, since 
his plots were unsolvable. Masked judges and masked exe- 
cutioners, with unlimited power, and no appeal from their judg- 
ments, in that hard, cruel age, were not likely to be lenient 
with men they suspected yet could not convict. 

We walked through the hall of the Council of Ten, and 
presently entered the infernal den of the Council of Three. 

The table around which they had sat was there still, and 
likewise the stations where the masked inquisitors and exe- 
cutioners formerly stood, frozen, upright and silent, till they re- 
ceived a bloody order, and then, without a word, moved off, 
like the inexorable machines they were, to carry it out. The 
frescoes on the walls were startlingly suited to the place. In 



224 THE PRISON. 

all the other saloons, the halls, the great state chambers of the 
palace, the walls and ceilings were bright with gilding, rich 
with elaborate carving, and resplendent with gallant pictures 
of Venetian victories in war, and Venetian display in foreign 
courts, and hallowed with portraits of the Virgin, the Saviour 
of men, and the holy saints that preached the Gospel of Peace 
upon earth — but here, in dismal contrast, were none but pic 
tures of death and dreadful suffering ! — not a living figure but 
was writhing in torture, not a dead one but was smeared with 
blood, gashed with wounds, and distorted with the agonies 
that had taken away its life ! 

From the palace to the gloomy prison is but a step — one 
might almost jump across the narrow canal that intervenes. 
The ponderous stone Bridge of Sighs crosses it at the second 
story — a bridge that is a covered tunnel — you can not be seen 
when you walk in it. It is partitioned lengthwise, and through 
one compartment walked such as bore light sentences in an- 
cient times, and through the other marched sadly the wretches 
whom the Three had doomed to lingering misery and utter 
oblivion in the dungeons, or to sudden and mysterious death. 
Down below the level of the water, by the light of smoking 
torches, we were shown the damp, thick-walled cells where 
many a proud patrician's life was eaten away by the long- 
drawn miseries of solitary imprisonment — without light, air, 
books ; naked, unshaven, uncombed, covered with vermin ; his 
useless tongue forgetting its office, with none to speak to ; the 
days and nights of his life no longer marked, but merged into 
one eternal eventless night ; far away from all cheerful sounds, 
buried in the silence of a tomb; forgotten by his helpless 
friends, and his fate a dark mystery to them forever ; losing his 
own memory at last, and knowing no more who he was or how he 
came there ; devouring the loaf of bread and drinking the wa- 
ter that were thrust into the cell by unseen hands, and troubling 
his worn spirit no more with hopes and fears and doubts and 
longings to be free ; ceasing to scratch vain prayers and com- 
plainings on walls where none, not even himself, could see 
them, and resigning himself to hopeless apathy, driveling child- 



IMPLEMENTS OF TORTURE. 225 

ishness, lunacy ! Many and many a sorrowful story like this 
these stony walls could tell if they could but speak. 

In a little narrow corridor, near by, they showed us where 
many a prisoner, after lying in the dungeons until he was for- 
gotten by all save his persecutors, was brought by masked exe- 
cutioners and garroted, or sewed up in a sack, passed through 
a little window to a boat, at dead of night, and taken to some 
remote spot and drowned. 

They used to show to visitors the implements of torture where- 
with the Three were wont to worm secrets out of the accused — 
villainous machines for crushing thumbs ; the stocks where a 
prisoner sat immovable while water fell drop by drop upon his 
head till the torture was more than humanity could bear ; and 
a devilish contrivance of steel, which inclosed a prisoner's head 
like a shell, and crushed it slowly by means of a screw. It 
bore the stains of blood that had trickled through its joints 
long ago, and on one side it had a projection whereon the tor- 
turer rested his elbow comfortably and bent down his ear to 
catch the moanings of the sufferer perishing within. 

Of course we went to see the venerable relic of the ancient 
glory of Venice, with its pavements worn and broken by tfo •» 
passing feet of a thousand years of plebeians and patricians — The 
Cathedral of St. Mark. It is built entirely of precious marbles, 
brought from the Orient — nothing in its composition is domestic. 
Its hoary traditions make it an object of absorbing interest to 
even the most careless stranger, and thus far it had interest for 
me ; but no further. I could not go into ecstacies over its 
coarse mosaics, its unlovely Byzantine architecture, or its five 
hundred curious interior columns from as many distant quarries. 
Every thing was worn out— every block of stone was smooth 
and almost shapeless with the polishing hands and shoulders 
of loungers who devoutly idled here in by-gone centuries and 
have died and gone to the dev — no, simply died, I mean. 

Under the altar repose the ashes of St. Mark — and Matthew, 
Luke and John, too, for all I know. Yenice reveres those rel* 
ics above all things earthly. For fourteen hundred years St, 
Mark has been her patron saint. Every thing about the city 

15 



226 



THE GLORY OF VENICE 



seems to be named after him or so named as to refer to him in 
some way— so named, or some purchase rigged in some way to 
scrape a sort of hurrahing acquaintance with him. That seems 
to be the idea. To be on good terms with St. Mark, seems to 
be the very summit of Yenetian ambition. They say St. Mark 
had a tame lion, and used to travel with him— and every where 




THE CATHEDRAL OF ST. MARKS. 



that St. Mark went, the lion was sure to go. It was his pro- 
tector, his friend, his librarian. And so the Winged Lion of 
St Mark, with the open Bible under his paw, is a favorite em- 
blem in the grand old city. It casts its shadow from the most 
ancient pillar in Venice, in the Grand Square of St. Mark, 
upon the throngs of free citizens below, and has so done for 
many a long century. The winged lion is found every where— 
and doubtless here, where the winged lion is, no harm can 
come. 



A TREASURE SECURED. 227 

St. Mark died at Alexandria, in Egypt. He was martyred, 
I think. However, that has nothing to do with my legend. 
About the founding of the city of Venice — say four hundred 
and fifty years after Christ — (for Venice is much younger than 
any other Italian city,) a priest dreamed that an angel told him 
that until the remains of St. Mark were brought to Venice, 
the city could never rise to high distinction among the nations ; 
that the body must be captured, brought to the city, and a 
magnificent church built over it ; and that if ever the Vene- 
tians allowed the Saint to be removed from his new resting- 
place, in that day Venice would perish from off the face of the 
the earth. The priest proclaimed his dream, and forthwith 
Venice set about procuring the corpse of St. Mark. One ex- 
pedition after another tried and failed, but the project was 
never abandoned during four hundred years. At last it was 
secured by stratagem, in the year eight hundred and something. 
The commander of a Venetian expedition disguised himself, 
stole the bones, separated them, and packed them in vessels 
filled with lard. The religion of Mahomet causes its devotees 
to abhor anything that is in the nature of pork, and so when 
the Christian was stopped by the officers at the gates of the city, 
they only glanced once into his precious baskets, then turned 
up their noses at the unholy lard, and let him go. The bones 
were buried in the vaults of the grand cathedral, which had 
been waiting long years to receive them, and thus the safety 
and the greatness of Venice were secured. And to this day 
there be those in Venice who believe that if those holy ashes 
were stolen away, the ancient city would vanish like a dream, 
and its foundations be buried forever in the nnremembering 
sea. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

THE Venetian gondola is as free and graceful, in its 
gliding movement, as a serpent. It is twenty or thirty 
ieet long, and is narrow and deep, like a canoe ; its sharp 
l)ow and stern sweep upward from the water like the horns 
of a crescent with the abruptness of the curve slightly modi- 
fied. 

The bow is ornamented with a steel comb with a battle-ax 
attachment which threatens to cut passing boats in two occa- 
sionally, but never does. The gondola is painted black be- 
cause in the zenith of Venetian magnificence the gondolas be- 
came too gorgeous altogether, and the Senate decreed that all 
such display must cease, and a solemn, unembellished black be 
substituted. If the truth were known, it would doubtless 
appear that rich plebeians grew too prominent in their affec- 
tation of patrician show on the Grand Canal, and required a 
■wholesome snubbing. Reverence for the hallowed Past and 
its traditions keeps the dismal fashion in force now that the 
compulsion exists no longer. So let it remain. It is the 
color of mourning. Venice mourns. The stern of the boat 
is decked over and the gondolier stands there. He uses a 
single oar — a long blade, of course, for he stands nearly erect. 
A wooden peg, a foot and a half high, with two slight crooks 
or curves in one side of it and one in the other, projects above 
the starboard gunwale. Against that peg the gondolier takes 
a purchase with his oar, changing it at intervals to the other 
aide of the peg or dropping it into another of the crooks, as 
the steering of the craft may demand — and how in the world 




GONDOLIZING. 

he can back and fill, shoot straight ahead, or flirt suddenly 
around a corner, and make the oar stay in those insignificant 
notches, is a problem to me and a never diminishing matter 
of interest. I am afraid I study the gondo- 
lier's marvelous skill more than I do the 
sculptured palaces we glide among. He 
cuts a corner so closely, now and then, or 
misses another gondola by such an imper- 
ceptible hair-breadth that I feel myself 
" scrooching," as the children say, just as 
one does when a buggy wheel grazes his 
elbow. But he makes all his calculations 

PEG. 

with the nicest precision, and goes darting 
in and out among a Broadway confusion of busy craft witb 
the easy confidence of the educated hackman. He never 
makes a mistake. 

Sometimes we go flying down the great canals at such a gait 
that we can get only the merest glimpses into front doors, and 
again, in obscure alleys in the suburbs, we put on a solemnity 
suited to the silence, the mildew, the stagnant waters, the 
clinging weeds, the deserted houses and the general lifeless- 
ness of the place, and move to the spirit of grave medita- 
tion. 

The gondolier is a picturesque rascal for all he wears no 
satin harness, no plumed bonnet, no silken tights. His atti- 
tude is stately ; he is lithe and supple ; all his movements are 
full of grace. When his long canoe, and his fine figure, tow- 
ering from its high perch on the stern, are cut against the 
evening sky, they make a picture that is very novel and strik- 
ing to a foreign eye. 

We sit in the cushioned carriage-body of a cabin, with the 
curtains drawn, and smoke, or read, or look out upon the pass- 
ing boats, the houses, the bridges, the people, and enjoy our- 
selves much more than we could in a buggy jolting over our 
eobble-stone pavements at home. This is the gentlest, pleas- 
antest locomotion we have ever known. 

But it seems queer — ever so queer — to see a boat doing 



230 



GONDOLIZING. 



duty as a private carriage. We see business men come to the 
front door, step into a gondola, instead of a street car, and go 
off down town to the counting-room. 

We see visiting young ladies stand on the stoop, and laugh, 
and kiss good-bye, and flirt their fans and say " Come soon — ■ 




now do — you've been just as mean as ever you can be — ■ 
mother's dying to see you — and we've moved into the new 
house, O such a love of a place ! — so convenient to the post- 
office and the church, and the Young Men's Christian Asso- 
ciation ; and we do have such fishing, and such carrying on, 



SHOPPING BY WATER. 231 

and such swimming-matches in the back yard — Oh, yon must 
come — no distance at all, and if you go down through by St. 
Mark's and the Bridge of Sighs, and cut through the alley and 
come up by the church of Santa Maria dei Frari, and into the 
Grand Canal, there isn't a bit of current — now do come, Sally 
Maria — by-bye !" and then the little humbug trips down the 
steps, jumps into the gondola, says, under her breath, " Disa- 
greeable old thing, I hope she wonH /" goes skimming away, 
round the corner ; and the other girl slams the street door and 
says, " Well, that infliction's over, any way, — but I suppose 
I've got to go and see her — tiresome stuck-up thing !" Hu- 
man nature appears to be just the same, all over the world. 
We see the diffident young man, mild of moustache, affluent 
of hair, indigent of brain, elegant of costume, drive up to her 
father's mansion, tell his hackman to bail out and wait, start 
fearfully up the steps and meet " the old gentleman " right on 
the threshold ! — hear him ask what street the new British 
Bank is in — as if that were what he came for — and then 
bounce into his boat and skurry away with his coward heart 
in his boots ! — see him come sneaking around the corner 
again, directly, with a crack of the curtain open toward the 
old gentleman's disappearing gondola, and out scampers his 
Susan with a flock of little Italian endearments fluttering 
from her lips, and goes to drive with him in the watery 
avenues down toward the Rialto. 

We see the ladies go out shopping, in the most natural way, 
and flit from street to street and from store to store, just in 
the good old fashion, except that they leave the gondola, in- 
stead of a private carriage, waiting at the curbstone a couple of 
hours for them, — waiting while they make the nice young 
clerks pull down tons and tons of silks and velvets and moire 
antiques and those things ; and then they buy a paper of pins 
and go paddling away to confer the rest of their disastrous 
patronage on some other firm. And they always have their 
purchases sent home just in the good old way. Human na- 
ture is very much the same all over the world ; and it is so 
like my dear native home to see a Yenetian lady go into a 



232 GAIETIES BY GASLIGHT. 

store and buy ten cents' worth of blue ribbon and have it sent 
home in a scow. Ah, it is these little touches of nature that 
move one to tears in these far-off foreign lands. 

We see little girls and boys go out in gondolas with their 
nurses, for an airing. We see staid families, with prayer-book 
and beads, enter the gondola dressed in their Sunday best, and 
float away to church. And at midnight we see the theatre 
break up and discharge its swarm of hilarious youth and 
beauty; we hear the cries of the hackman-gondoliers, and 
behold the struggling crowd jump aboard, and the black 
multitude of boats go skimming down the moonlit avenues; 
we see them separate here and there, and disappear up diver- 
gent streets ; we hear the faint sounds of laughter and of 
shouted farewells floating up out of the distance ; and then, 
the strange pageant being gone, we have lonely stretches of 
glittering water — of stately buildings — of blotting shadows — ■ 
of weird stone faces creeping into the moonlight — of deserted 
bridges — of motionless boats at anchor. And over all broods 
that mysterious stillness, that stealthy quiet, that befits so well 
this old dreaming Yenice. 

We have been pretty much every where in our gondola. 
We have bought beads and photographs in the stores, and wax 
matches in the Great Square of St. Mark. The last remark 
suggests a digression. Every body goes to this vast square in 
the evening. The military bands play in the centre of it and 
countless couples of ladies and gentlemen promenade up and 
down on either side, and platoons of them are constantly 
drifting away toward the old Cathedral, and by the venerable 
column with the Winged Lion of St. Mark on its top, and out 
to where the boats lie moored ; and other platoons are as con- 
stantly arriving from the gondolas and joining the great 
throng. Between the promenaders and the side-walks are 
seated hundreds and hundreds of people at small tables, 
smoking and taking granita, (a first cousin to ice-cream ;) on 
the side-walks are more employing themselves in the same 
way. The shops in the first floor of the tall rows of buildings 
that wall in three sides of the square are brilliantly lighted, 



AMERICAN SNOBS ABROAD. 233 

the air is filled with music and merry voices, and altogether 
the scene is as bright and spirited and full of cheerfulness as 
any man could desire. We enjoy it thoroughly. Yery many 
of the young women are exceedingly pretty and dress with 
rare good taste. We are gradually and laboriously learning 
the ill-manners of staring them unflinchingly in the face — not 
because such conduct is agreeable to us, but because it is the 
custom of the country and they say the girls like it. We wish 
to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different 
countries, so that we can " show off" and astonish people 
when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our un- 
traveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we 
can't shake off. All our passengers are paying strict atten- 
tion to this thing, with the end in view which I have 
mentioned. The gentle reader will never, never know 
what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad. 
I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle 
reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a con- 
summate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and 
extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him 
brother. I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own 
heart when I shall have finished my travels. 

On this subject let me remark that there are Americans 
abroad in Italy who have actually forgotten their mother 
tongue in three months — forgot it in France. They can not 
even write their address in English in a hotel register. I ap- 
pend these evidences, which I copied verbatim from the regis- 
ter of a hotel in a certain Italian city : 

" John P. Whitcomb, Etats Unis. 

" Wm. L. Ainsworth, travattleur (he meant traveler, I suppose,) Etats Urns. 
" George P. Morton et ftls, d 1 Amerique. 
" Lloyd B. Williams, et trots amis, ville de Boston, Amerique. 
" J. Ellsworth Baker, tout de suite de France, place de naissance Amerique, desti- 
nation la Grand Bretagne." 

I love this sort of people. A lady passenger of ours tells 
©f a fellow-citizen of hers who spent eight weeks in Paris and 
then returned home and addressed his dearest old bosom 



234 



AMERICAN SNOBS AT HOME 



friend Herbert as Mr. " Er-bare !" He apologized, though, 
and said, " 'Pon my soul it is aggravating, but I cahn't help it 
— I have got so used to speaking nothing but French, my dear 
Erbare — damme there it goes again ! — got so used to French 
pronunciation that I cahn't get rid of it — it is positively an- 
noying, I assure you." This entertaining idiot, whose name 
was Gordon, allowed himself to be hailed three times in the 
street before he paid any attention, and then begged a thou- 
sand pardons and said he had grown so accustomed to hearing 
himself addressed as M'sieu Qor-r-dong" with a roll to the r, 
that he had forgotten the legitimate 
sound of his name ! He wore a rose 
in his button -hole ; he gave the French 
salutation — two flips of the hand in 
front of the face ; he called Paris Pair- 
ree in ordinary English conversation ; 
he carried envelopes bearing foreign 
postmarks protruding from his breast- 
pocket ; he cultivated a moustache and 
imperial, and did what else he could to 
suggest to the beholder his pet fancy 
that he resembled Louis Napoleon — 
and in a spirit of thankfulness which is 
entirely unaccountable, considering the 
slim foundation there was for it, he 
praised his Maker that he was as he 
was, and went on enjoying his little 
life just the same as if he really had 
been deliberately designed and erected by the great Architect 
of the Universe. 

Think of our Whit combs, and our Ains worths and our 
Williamses writing themselves down in dilapidated French 
in foreign hotel registers ! We laugh at Englishmen, when 
we are at home, for sticking so sturdily to their national ways 
and customs, but we look back upon it from abroad very forgiv- 
ingly. It is not pleasant to see an American thrusting his 
nationality forward obtrusively in a foreign land, but Oh, it is 




M'SIEU GOR-R-DONG-. 



SEEING THE SIGHTS. 235 

pitiable to see him making of himself a thing that is neither 
male nor female, neither fish, flesh, nor fowl — a poor, miser- 
able, hermaphrodite Frenchman ! 

Among a long list of churches, art galleries, and such 
things, visited by us in Venice, I shall mention only one — the 
church of Santa Maria dei Frari. It is about five hundred 
years old, I believe, and stands on twelve hundred thousand 
piles. In it lie the body of Canova and the heart of Titian, 
under magnificent monuments. Titian died at the age of 
almost one hundred years. A plague which swept away fifty 
thousand lives was raging at the time, and there is notable 
evidence of the reverence in which the great painter was 
held, in the fact that to him alone the state permitted a public 
funeral in all that season of terror and death. 

In this church, also, is a monument to the doge Foscari, 
whose name a once resident of Yenice, Lord Byron, has made 
permanently famous. 

The monument to the doge Giovanni Pesaro, in this church, 
is a curiosity in the way of mortuary adornment. It is eighty 
feet high and is fronted like some fantastic pagan temple. 
Against it stand four colossal Nubians, as black as night, 
dressed in white marble garments. The black legs are bare, 
and through rents in sleeves and breeches, the skin, of 
shiny black marble, shows. The artist was as ingenious as 
his funeral designs were absurd. There are two bronze skele- 
tons bearing scrolls, and two great dragons uphold the sar- 
cophagus. On high, amid all this grotesqueness, sits the de- 
parted doge. 

In the conventual buildings attached to this church are the 
state archives of Venice. We did not see them, but they 
are said to number millions of documents. " They are the 
records of centuries of the most watchful, observant and sus- 
picious government that ever existed — in which every thing 
was written down and nothing spoken out." They fill nearly 
three hundred rooms. Among them are manuscripts from the 
archives of nearly two thousand families, monasteries and 
convents. The secret history of Venice for a thousand years 



236 



SEEING THE SIGHTS. 



is here — its plots, its hidden trials, its assassinations, its com- 
missions of hireling spies and masked bravoes — food, ready to 
hand, for a world of dark and mysterious romances. 

Yes, I think we have seen all of Venice. We have seen, in 
these old churches, a profusion of costly and elaborate 

sepulchre ornamentation such 
as we never dreampt of before. 
We have stood in the dim re- 
ligious light of these hoarj 
sanctuaries, in the midst of 
long ranks of dusty monu- 
ments and effigies of the great 
dead of Venice, until we 
seemed drifting back, back, 
back, into the solemn past, 
and looking upon the scenes 
and mingling with the people* 
of a remote antiquity. We 
have been in a half-waking 
sort of dream all the time. I 
do not know how else to de- 
scribe the feeling. A part of 
our being has remained still 
in the nineteenth century, 
while another part of it has 
seemed in some unaccountable 
way walking among the phan- 
toms of the tenth. 
We have seen famous pictures until our eyes are weary with 
looking at them and refuse to find interest in them any longer. 
And what wonder, when there are twelve hundred pictures by 
Palma the Younger in Venice and fifteen hundred by Tintor- 
etto ? And behold there are Titians and the works of other 
artists in proportion. We have seen Titian's celebrated Cain 
and Abel, his David and Goliah, his Abraham's Sacrifice. 
We have seen Tintoretto's monster picture, which is seventy- 
four feet long and I do not know how many feet high, and 




MONUMENT TO THE DOGE. 



A CONFESSION. 237 

thought it a very commodious picture. We have seen pictures 
of martyrs enough, and saints enough, to regenerate the 
world. I ought not to confess it, but still, since one has no 
opportunity in America to acquire a critical judgment in art, 
and since I could not hope to become educated in it in Europe 
in a few short weeks, I may therefore as well acknowledge 
with such apologies as may be due, that to me it seemed that 
when I had seen one of these martyrs I had seen them all. 
They all have a marked family resemblance to each other, they 
dress alike, in coarse monkish robes and sandals, they are all 
bald headed, they all stand in about the same attitude, and 
without exception they are gazing heavenward with counte- 
nances which the Ainsworths, the Mortons and the Williamses, 
et fils, inform me are full of " expression." To me there 
is nothing tangible about these imaginary portraits, nothing 
that I can grasp and take a living interest in. If great Titian 
had only been gifted with prophecy, and had skipped a martyr, 
and gone over to England and painted a portrait of Shaks- 
peare, even as a youth, which we could all have confidence in 
now, the world down to the latest generations would have for- 
given him the lost martyr in the rescued seer. I think pos- 
terity could have spared one more martyr for the sake of a 
great historical picture of Titian's time and painted by his 
brush — such as Columbus returning in chains from the dis- 
covery of a world, for instance. The old masters did paint 
some Venetian historical pictures, and these we did not tire of 
looking at, notwithstanding representations of the formal intro- 
duction of defunct doges to the Virgin Mary in regions beyond 
the clouds clashed rather harshly with the proprieties, it 
seemed to us. 

But humble as we are, and unpretending, in the matter of 
art, our researches among -the painted monks and martyrs 
have not been wholly in vain. We have striven hard to learn. 
We have had some success. We have mastered some things, 
possibly of trifling import in the eyes of the learned, but to 
us they give pleasure, and we take as much pride in our little 
acquirements as do others who have learned far more, and we 



238 



LEARNING THE RUDIMENTS 




ST. MARK, BY THE OLD MASTERS. 



love to display them full as well. When we see a monk going 

about with a lion and look- 
ing tranquilly up to heaven, 
we know that that is St. 
Mark. When we see a monk 
with a book and a pen, look- 
ing tranquilly up to heaven, 
trying to think of a word, we 
know that that is St. Mat- 
thew. When we see a monk 
sitting on a rock, looking 
tranquilly up to heaven, with 
a human skull beside him, 
and without other baggage, 
we know that that is St. Jer- 
ome. Because we know that 
he always went flying light in 
the matter of baggage. 
When we see a party looking 
tranquilly up to heaven, un- 
conscious that his body is shot 
through and through with ar- 
rows, we know that that is 
St. Sebastian. When we see 
other monks looking tranquil- 
ly up to heaven, but having no 
trade-mark, we always ask 
who those parties are. We 
do this because we humbly 
wish to learn. We have seen 
thirteen thousand St. Jeromes, 
and twenty-two thousand St. 
Marks, and sixteen thousand 
St. Matthews, and sixty 
thousand St. Sebastians, and 
four millions of assorted 
monks, undesignated, and we 

BT. JEROME, BY THE OLD MASTERS. 




EXPLANATION. 



239 




ST. SEBASTIAN, BY THE OLD MASTERS. 



feel encouraged to believe that when we have seen some more 
of these various pictures, and had a larger experience, we 
shall begin to take an absorbing 
interest in them like our cul- 
tivated countrymen from 
Amerique. 

Now it does give me real pain 
to speak in this almost unappre- 
ciative way of the old masters 
and their martyrs, because good 
friends of mine in the ship- 
friends who do thoroughly and 
conscientiously appreciate them 
and are in every way competent 
to discriminate between good 
pictures and inferior ones — have 
urged me for my own sake not 
to make public the fact that I 
lack this appreciation and this» 
critical discrimination myself. 
I believe that what I have writ- 
ten and may still write about 
pictures will give them pain, and 
I am honestly sorry for it. I 
even promised that I would 
hide my uncouth sentiments in 
my own breast. But alas! I 
never could keep a promise. I 
do not blame myself for this 
weakness, because the fault 

must lie in my physical organization. It is likely that such a 
very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which 
enables me to make promises, that the organ which should 
enable me to keep them was crowded out. But I grieve not. 
I like no half-way things. I had rather have one faculty 
nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary capacity. 
I certainly meant to keep that promise, but I find I can not do 




ST. UNKNOWN, BY THE OLD MASTERS. 



240 THE 

it. It is impossible to travel through Italy without speaking 
of pictures, and can I see them through others' eyes ? 

If I did not so delight in the grand pictures that are spread 
before me every day of my life by that monarch of all the 
old masters, Nature, I should come to believe, sometimes, that 
I had in me no appreciation of the beautiful, whatsoever. 

It seems to me that whenever I glory to think that for once 
I have discovered an ancient painting that is beautiful and 
worthy of all praise, the pleasure it gives me is an infallible 
proof that it is not a beautiful picture and not in any wise 
worthy of commendation. This very thing has occurred 
more times than I can mention, in Venice. In every single 
instance the guide has crushed out my swelling enthusiasm 
with the remark : 

" It is nothing — it is of the Renaissance" 

I did not know what in the mischief the Renaissance was, 
and so always I had to simply say, 

" Ah ! so it is — I had not observed it before." 

I could not bear to be ignorant before a cultivated negro, 
the offspring of a South Carolina slave. But it occurred too 
often for even my self-complacency, did that exasperating " It 
is nothing — it is of the Renaissance." I said at last : 

" Who is this Renaissance? "Where did he come from? 
Who gave him permission to cram the Republic with his 
execrable daubs ?" 

We learned, then, that Renaissance was not a man ; that 
renaissance was a term used to signify what was at best but an 
imperfect rejuvenation of art. The guide said that after 
Titian's time and the time of the other great names we had 
grown so familiar with, high art declined ; then it partially 
rose again — an inferior sort of painters sprang up, and these 
shabby pictures were the work of their hands. Then I said, 
in my heat, that I " wished to goodness high art had declined 
five hundred years sooner." The Renaissance pictures suit me 
very well, though sooth to say its school were too much given 
to painting real men and did not indulge enough in martyrs. 

The guide I have spoken of is the only one we have had 



CONTKABAND GUIDE. 



241 



jet who knew any thing. He was born in South Carolina, 
slave parents. 
They came to 
Venice while 
he was an in- 
fant. He has 
grown up here. 
He is well ed- 
ucated. He 
reads, writes, 
and speaks 
English, Ital- 
ian, Spanish, 
and French, 
with perfect fa- 
cility ; is a 
worshipper of 
art and thor- 
oughly conver- 
sant with it ; 
knows the his- 
tory of Venice 
by heart and 
never tires of 
talking of her 
illustrious ca- 
reer. He dress- 
es better than 
any of us, I 
think, and is 
daintily polite. 
Negroes are 
deemed as 

good as white 
people, in Yen- 
ice, and so this 
man feel? no 



of 




242 THE CONSPIRACY. 

desire to go back to his native land. His judgment is cor- 
rect. 

I have had another shave. I was writing in our front room 
this afternoon and trying hard to keep my attention on my 
work and refrain from looking out upon the canal. I was 
resisting the soft influences of the climate as well as I could, 
and endeavoring to overcome the desire to be indolent and 
happy. The boys sent for a barber. They asked me if I 
would be shaved. I reminded them of my tortures in Genoa, 
Milan, Como ; of my declaration that I would suffer no more 
on Italian soil. I said " Not any for me, if you please." 

I wrote on. The barber began on the doctor. I heard him 



" Dan, this is the easiest shave I have had since we left the 
ship." 

He said again, presently : 

" Why Dan, a man could go to sleep with this man shaving 
him." 

Dan took the chair. Then he said : 

" "Why this is Titian. This is one of the old masters." 

I wrote on. Directly Dan said : 

" Doctor, it is perfect luxury. The ship's barber isn't anj 
thing to him." 

My rough beard was distressing me beyond measure. The 
barber was rolling up his apparatus. The temptation was too 
strong. I said : 

" Hold on, please. Shave me also." 

I sat down in the chair and closed my eyes. The barber 
soaped my face, and then took his razor and gave me a rake 
that well nigh threw me into convulsions. I jumped out of 
the chair : Dan and the doctor were both wiping blood off 
their faces and laughing. 

I said it was a mean, disgraceful fraud. 

They said that the misery of this shave had gone so far beyond 
anything they had ever experienced before, that they could not 
bear the idea of losing such a chance of hearing a cordiaj 
opinion from me on the subject. 



MOVING AGAIN. 243 

It was shameful. But there was no help for it. The skin- 
ning was begun and had to be finished. The tears flowed 
with every rake, and so did the fervent execrations. The 
barber grew confused, and brought blood every time. I think 
the boys enjoyed it better than any thing they have seen or 
heard since they left home. 

We have seen the Campanile, and Byron's house and Bal- 
bi's the geographer, and the palaces of all the ancient dukes 
and doges of Yenice, and we have seen their effeminate de- 
scendants airing their nobility in fashionable French attire 
in the Grand Square of St. Mark, and eating ices and drink- 
ing cheap wines, instead of wearing gallant coats of mail and 
destroying fleets and armies as their great ancestors did in the 
days of Yenetian glory. "We have seen no bravoes with pois- 
oned stilettos, no masks, no wild carnival ; but we have seen 
the ancient pride of Yenice, the grim Bronze Horses that 
figure in a thousand legends. Yenice may well cherish them, 
for they are the only horses she ever had. It is said there are 
hundreds of people in this curious city who never have seen a 
living horse in their lives. It is entirely true, no doubt. 

And so, having satisfied ourselves, we depart to-morrow, 
and leave the venerable Queen of the Republics to summon 
her vanished ships, and marshal her shadowy armies, and 
know again in dreams the pride of her old renown. 



CHAPTEE XXIV. 

SOME of the Quaker City's passengers had arrived in Yen- 
ice from Switzerland and other lands before we left 
there, and others were expected every day. We heard of no 
^casualties among them, and no sickness. 

"We were a little fatigued with sight seeing, and so we 
rattled through a good deal of country by rail without caring 
to stop. I took few notes. I find no mention of Bologna in 
my memorandum book, except that we arrived there in good 
season, but saw none of the sausages for which the place is so 
justly celebrated. 

Pistoia awoke but a passing interest. 

Florence pleased us for a while. I think we appreciated 
the great figure of David in the grand square, and the sculp- 
tured group they call the Rape of the Sabines. We wandered 
through the endless collections of paintings and statues of the 
Pitti and Ufizzi galleries, of course. I make that statement 
in self-defense ; there let it stop. I could not rest under the im- 
putation that I visited Florence and did not traverse its weary 
miles of picture galleries. We tried indolently to recollect 
something about the Guelphs and Ghibelines and the other his- 
torical cut-throats whose quarrels and assassinations make up 
so large a share of Florentine history, but the subject was not 
attractive. We had been robbed of all the fine mountain 
scenery on our little journey by a system of railroading that 
tiad three miles of tunnel to a hundred yards of daylight, and 
we were not inclined to be sociable with Florence. We had 
<*een the spot, outside the city somewhere, where these people 



TOMB OF GALILEO. 



245 



had allowed the bones of Galileo to rest in unconsecrated 
ground for an age because his great discovery that the world 
turned around was regarded as a damning heresy by the 
church ; and we know that long after the world had accepted 
his theory and raised his name high in the list of its great 
men, they had still let him rot there. That we had lived to 
see his dust in honored sepulture in the church of Santa Croce 
we owed to a society of literati, and not to Florence or her 
rulers. We saw Dante's tomb in that church, also, but we- 
were glad to know that his body was not in it ; that the un- 
grateful city that had exiled him and persecuted him would 
give much to have it there, but need not hope to ever secure? 
that high honor to herself. ' Medicis are good enough for Flor- 
ence. Let her plant Medicis and build grand monuments 
over them to testify how gratefully she was wont to lick the 
hand that scourged her. 




Magnanimous Florence ! Her jewelry marts are filled 
with artists in mosaic. Florentine mosaics are the choicest in 
all the world. Florence loves to have that said. Florence m 



246 



DAZZLING GENEROSITY. 



proud of it. Florence would foster this specialty of hers. 
She is grateful to the artists that bring to her this high credit 
and fill her coffers with foreign money, and so she encourages 
them with pensions. With pensions ! Think of the lavish- 

ness of it. She knows that 
people who piece together 
the beautiful trifles die 
early, because the labor if 
so confining, and so ex- 
hausting to hand and brain> 
and so she has decreed that 
all these people who reach 
the age of sixty shall have, 
a pension after that ! I 
have not heard that any of 
them have called for their 
dividends yet. One man 
did fight along till he was 
sixty, and started after his 
pension, but it appeared 
that there had been a mis- 
take of a year in his fam- 
ily record, and so he gare 
it up and died. 

These artists will take particles of stone or glass no larger 
than a mustard seed, and piece them together on a sleeve but- 
ton or a shirt stud, so smoothly and with such nice adjust- 
ment of the delicate shades of color the pieces bear, as to 
form a pigmy rose with stem, thorn, leaves, petals complete, 
and all as softly and as truthfully tinted as though Nature had 
builded it herself. They will counterfeit a fly, or a high- 
toned bug, or the ruined Coliseum, within the cramped circle 
of a breastpin, and do it so deftly and so neatly that any man 
might think a master painted it. 

I saw a little table in the great mosaic school in Florence — 
a little trifle of a centre table — whose top was made of some 
sort of precious polished stone, and in the stone was inlaid the 




THE PENSIONER. 



WONDERFUL MOSAICS. 247 

figure of a flute, with bell-mouth and a mazy complication of 
keys. No painting in the world could have been softer or 
richer-, no shading out of one tint into another could have 
been more perfect ; no work of art of any kind could have 
been more faultless than this flute, and yet to count the multi- 
tude of little fragments of stone of which they swore it was 
formed would bankrupt any man's arithmetic ! I do not 
think one could have seen where two particles joined each 
other with eyes of ordinary shrewdness. Certainly we could 
detect no such blemish. This table-top cost the labor of one 
man for ten long years, so they said, and it was for sale for 
thirty-five thousand dollars. 

We went to the Church of Santa Croce, from time to time, 
in Florence, to weep over the tombs of Michael Angelo, 
Raphael and Machiavelli, (I suppose they are buried there, 
but it may be that they reside elsewhere and rent their tombs 
to other parties — such being the fashion in Italy,) and between 
times we used to go and stand on the bridges and admire the 
Arno. It is popular to admire the Arno. It is a great his- 
torical creek with four feet in the channel and some scows 
floating around. It would be a very plausible river if they 
would pump some water into it. They all call it a river, and 
they honestly think it is a river, do these dark and bloody 
Florentines. They even help out the delusion by building 
bridges over it. I do not see why they are too good to 
wade. 

How the fatigues and annoyances of travel fill one with 
bitter prejudices sometimes ! I might enter Florence under 
happier auspices a month hence and find it all beautiful, all 
attractive. But I do not care to think of it now, at all, nor 
of its roomy shops filled to the ceiling with snowy marble and 
alabaster copies of all the celebrated sculptures in Europe — 
copies so enchanting to the eye that I wonder how they can 
really be shaped like the dingy petrified nightmares they are 
the portraits of. I got lost in Florence at nine o'clock, one 
night, and staid lost in that labyrinth of narrow streets and 
long rows of vast buildings that look all alike, until toward 



248 



LOST AGAIN. 



three o'clock in the morning. It was a pleasant night and at 
first there were a good many people abroad, and there were 
cheerful lights about. Later, I grew accustomed to prowling 
about mysterious drifts and tunnels and astonishing and inter- 
esting myself with coming around corners expecting to find 
the hotel staring me in the face, and not finding it doing any 
thing of the kind. Later still, I felt tired. I soon felt re- 
markably tired. But there was no one abroad, now — not even 
a policeman. I walked till I was out of all patience, and very 
hot and thirsty. At last, somewhere after one o'clock, I 
came unexpectedly to one of the city gates. I knew then that 
I was very far from the hotel. The soldiers thought I wanted 
to leave the city, and they sprang up and barred the way with 
their muskets. I said : 




I WANT TO GO HOME. 



"Hotel d'Europe!" 

It was all the Italian J knew, and I was not certain whether 
that was Italian or French. The soldiers looked stupidly at 



FOUND AGAIN, BY ACCIDENT. 249 

each other and at me, and shook their heads and took me into 
custody. I said I wanted to go home. They did not under- 
stand me. They took me into the guard-house and searched 
me, but they found no sedition on me. They found a small 
piece of soap (we carry soap with ns, now,) and I made them 
a present of it, seeing that they regarded it as a curiosity. I 
continued to say Hotel d'Europe, and they continued to shake 
their heads, until at last a young soldier nodding in the cor- 
ner roused up and said something. He said he knew where 
the hotel was, I suppose, for the officer of the guard sent him 
away with me. We walked a hundred or a hundred and fifty 
miles, it appeared to me, and then he got lost. He turned 
this way and that, and finally gave it up and signified that he 
was going to spend the remainder of the morning trying to 
find the city gate again. At that moment it struck me that 
there was something familiar about the house over the way. 
It was the hotel ! 

It was a happy thing for me that there happened to be a 
soldier there that knew even as much as he did ; for they say 
that the policy of the government is to change the soldiery 
from one place to another constantly and from country to 
city, so that they can not become acquainted with the people 
and grow lax in their duties and enter into plots and conspir- 
acies with friends. My experiences of Florence were chiefly 
unpleasant. I will change the subject. 

At Pisa we climbed up to the top of the strangest structure 
the world has any knowledge of — the Leaning Tower. As 
every one knows, it is in the neighborhood of one hundred 
and eighty feet high — and I beg to observe that one hundred 
and eighty feet reach to about the hight of four ordinary three- 
story buildings piled one on top of the other, and is a very 
considerable altitude for a tower of uniform thickness to aspire 
to, even when it stands upright — yet this one leans more than 
thirteen feet out of the perpendicular. It is seven hundred 
years old, but neither history or tradition say whether it wa& 
built as it is, purposely, or whether one of its sides has settled. 
There is no record that it ever stood straight up. It is built 



960 THE LEANING TOWEE OF PISA. 

of marble. It is an airy and a beautiful structure, and each 
of its eight stories is encircled by fluted columns, some of 



LEANING TOWER. 



marble and some of granite, with Corinthian capitals that 
were handsome when they were new. It is a bell tower, and 
in its top hangs a chime of ancient bells. The winding stair- 
case within is dark, but one always knows which side of the 
tower he is on because of his naturally gravitating from one 
aide to the other of the staircase with the rise or dip of the 
tower. Some of* the stone steps are foot-worn only on one 
end ; others only on the other end ; others only in the middle. 
To look down into the tower from the top is like looking 
down into a tilted well. A rope that hangs from the centre 



THE ANCIENT DDOMO. 251 

*f the top touches the wall before it reaches the bottom. Stand- 
ing on the summit, one does not feel altogether comfortable 
when he looks down from the high side ; but to crawl on your 
"breast to the verge on the lower side and try to stretch your 
neck out far enough to see the base of the tower, makes your 
flesh creep, and convinces you for a single moment in spite of 
all your philosophy, that the building is falling. You handle 
yourself very carefully, all the time, under the silly impres- 
sion that if it is not falling, your trifling weight will start it 
unless you are particular not to " bear down " on it. 

The Duomo, close at hand, is one of the finest cathedrals in 
Europe. It is eight hundred years old. Its grandeur has out- 
lived the high commercial prosperity and the political import- 
ance that made it a necessity, or rather a possibility. Sur- 
rounded by poverty, decay and ruin, it conveys to us a more 
tangible impression of the former greatness of Pisa than books 
•ould give us. 

The Baptistery, which is a few years older than the Leaning 
Tower, is a stately rotunda, of huge dimensions, and was a 
costly structure. In it hangs the lamp whose measured swing 
suggested to Galileo the pendulum. It looked an insignifi- 
cant thing to have conferred upon the world of science and 
mechanics such a mighty extension of their dominions as it 
has. Pondering, in its suggestive presence, I seemed to see a 
crazy universe of swinging disks, the toiling children of this 
sedate parent. He appeared to have an intelligent expression 
about him of knowing that he was not a lamp at all ; that he 
was a Pendulum ; a pendulum disguised, for prodigious and 
inscrutable purposes of his own deep devising, and not a com- 
mon pendulum either, but the old original patriarchal Pendu- 
lum — the Abraham Pendulum of the world. 

This Baptistery is endowed with the most pleasing echo of 
all the echoes we have read of. The guide sounded two so- 
porous notes, about half an octave apart ; the echo answered 
with the most enchanting, the most melodious, the richest 
blending of sweet sounds that one can imagine. It was like 
a long-drawn chord of a church organ, infinitely softened by 



252 A NEW HOLY SEPULCHRE. 

distance. I may be extravagant in this matter, but if this be 
the case my ear is to blame — not my pen. I am describing a 
memory — and one that will remain long with me. 

The peculiar devotional spirit of the olden time, which 
placed a higher confidence in outward forms of. worship than 
in the watchful guarding of the heart against sinful thoughts 
and the hands against sinful deeds, and which believed in the 
protecting virtues of inanimate objects made holy by contact 
with holy things, is illustrated in a striking manner in one of 
the cemeteries of Pisa, The tombs are set in soil brought 
in ships from the Holy Land ages ago. To be buried in such 
ground was regarded by the ancient Pisans as being more 
potent for salvation than many masses purchased of the 
church and the vowing of many candles to the Yirgin. 

Pisa is believed to be about three thousand years old. It 
was one of the twelve great cities of ancient Etruria, that 
commonwealth which has left so many monuments in testi- 
mony of its extraordinary advancement, and so little historj 
of itself that is tangible and comprehensible. A Pisan anti- 
quarian gave me an ancient tear-jug which he averred was full 
four thousand years old. It was found among the ruins of 
one of the oldest of the Etruscan cities. He said it came from 
a tomb, and was used by some bereaved family in that remote 
age when even the Pyramids of Egypt were young, Damas- 
cus a village, Abraham a prattling infant and ancient Troy 
not yet dreampt of, to receive the tears wept for some lost idol 
of a household. It spoke to us in a language of its own ; and 
with a pathos more tender than any words might bring, its 
mute eloquence swept down the long roll of the centuries 
with its tale of a vacant chair, a familiar footstep missed from 
the threshold, a pleasant voice gone from the chorus, a van- 
ished form ! — a tale which is always so new to us, so startling, 
so terrible, so benumbing to the senses, and behold how 
threadbare and old it is ! No shrewdly-worded history could 
have brought the myths and shadows of that old dreamy age 
before us clothed with human flesh and warmed with human 
sympathies so vividly as did this poor little unsentient vessel 
of pottery. 



A FALLEN REPUBLIC. 253 

Pisa was a republic in the middle ages, with a government 
of her own, armies and navies of her own and a great com- 
merce. She was a warlike power, and inscribed upon her 
banners many a brilliant fight with Genoese and Turks. It 
is said that the city once numbered a population of four hun- 
dred thousand ; but her sceptre has passed from her grasp, 
now, her ships and her armies are gone, her commerce is dead. 
Her battle-flags bear the mold and the dust of centuries, 
her marts are deserted, she has shrunken far within her 
crumbling walls, and her great population has diminished to 
twenty thousand souls. She has but one thing left to boast 
of, and that is not much, viz : she is the second city of Tus- 
cany. 

We reached Leghorn in time to see all we wished to see of 
it long before the city gates were closed for the evening, and 
then came on board the ship. 

We felt as though we had been away from home an age. "We 
never entirely appreciated, before, what a very pleasant den 
our state-room is ; nor how jolly it is to sit at dinner in one's 
own seat in one's own cabin, and hold familiar conversation 
with friends in one's own language. Oh, the rare happiness 
of comprehending every single word that is said, and knowing 
that every word one says in return will be understood as well ! 
We would talk ourselves to death, now, only there are only 
about ten passengers out of the sixty-five to talk to. The 
others are wandering, we hardly know where. We shall not 
go ashore in Leghorn. We are surfeited with Italian cities 
for the present, and much prefer to walk the familiar quarter- 
deck and view this one from a distance. 

The stupid magnates of this Leghorn government can not 
understand that so large a steamer as ours could cross the 
broad Atlantic with no other purpose than to indulge a party 
of ladies and gentlemen in a pleasure excursion. It looks too 
improbable. It is suspicious, they think. Something more 
important must be hidden behind it all. They can not under- 
stand it, and they scorn the evidence of the ship's papers. 
They have decided at last that we are a battalion of incen- 



254 THREATS OF QUARANTINE. 

diary, blood-thirsty Garibaldians in disguise! And in a)l 
seriousness they have set a gun-boat to watch the vessel night 
and day, with orders to close down on any revolutionary 
movement in a twinkling ! Police boats are on patrol duty 
about us all the time, and it is as much as a sailor's liberty is 
worth to show himself in a red shirt. These policemen fol- 
low the executive officer's boat from shore to ship and from 
ship to shore and watch his dark maneuvres with a vigilant 
eye. They will arrest him yet unless he assumes an expres- 
sion of countenance that shall have less of carnage, insurrec- 
tion and sedition in it. A visit paid in a friendly way to 
General Garibaldi yesterday (by cordial invitation,) by some of 
our passengers, has gone far to confirm the dread suspicions 
the government harbors toward us. It is thought the friendly 
visit was only the cloak of a bloody conspiracy. These people 
draw near a~~ watch us when we bathe in the sea from the 
ship's side. Do they think we are communing with a reserve 
force of rascals at the bottom? 

It is said ^hat we shall probably be quarantined at Naples. 
Two or three of us prefer not to run this risk. Therefore, 
when we are rested, we propose to go in a French steamer to 
Civita Yecchia, and from thence to Rome, and by rail t* 
Naples. They do not quarantine the cars, no matter where 
they got their passengers from. 



OHAPTEE XXV. 



THERE are a good many things about this Italy which I 
do not understand — and more especially I can not under- 
stand how a bankrupt Government can have such palatial 
railroad depots and such marvels of turnpikes. Why, these 
latter are as hard as adamant, as straight as a line, as smooth 
as a floor, and as white as snow. When it is too dark to see 
any other object, one can still see the white turnpikes of 
France and Italy; and they are clean enough to eat from, 
without a table-cloth. And yet no tolls are charged. 

As for the railways — we have none like them. The cars 
slide as smoothly along as if they were on runners. The 
depots are vast palaces of cut marble, with stately colonnades 
of the same royal stone traversing them from end to end, and 
with ample walls and ceilings richly decorated with frescoes. 
The lofty gateways are graced with statues, and the broad 
floors are all laid in polished flags of marble. 

These things win me more than Italy's hundred galleries of 
priceless art treasures, because I can understand the one and 
am not competent to appreciate the other. In the turnpikes, 
the railways, the depots, and the new boulevards of uniform 
houses in Florence and other cities here, I see the genius of 
Louis Napoleon, or rather, I see the works of that statesman 
imitated. But Louis has taken care that in France there shall 
be a foundation for these improvements — money. He has 
always the wherewithal to back up his projects ; they strengthen 
France and never weaken her. Her material prosperity is 
genuine. But here the case is different. This country is 



256 THE WORKS OF BANKRUPTCY. 

bankrupt. There is no real foundation for these great works. 
The prosperity they would seem to indicate is a pretence. 
There is no money in the treasury, and so they enfeeble her 
instead of strengthening. Italy has achieved the dearest wish 
of her heart and become an independent State — and in so doing 
she has drawn an elephant in the political lottery. She has 
nothing to feed it on. Inexperienced in government, she 
plunged into all manner of useless expenditure, and swamped 
her treasury almost in a day. She squandered millions of 
francs on a navy which she did not need, and the first time 
she took her new toy into action she got it knocked higher 
than Gilderoy's kite — to use the language of the Pilgrims. 

But it is an ill-wind that blows nobody good. A year ago, 
when Italy saw utter ruin staring her in the face and her 
greenbacks hardly worth the paper they were printed on, her 
Parliament ventured upon a coup de main that would have 
appalled the stoutest of her statesmen under less desperate cir- 
cumstances. They, in a manner, confiscated the domains of 
the Church ! This in priest-ridden Italy ! This in a land 
which has groped in the midnight of priestly superstition for 
sixteen hundred years ! It was a rare good fortune for Italy, 
the stress of weather that drove her to break from this prison- 
house. 

They do not call it confiscating the church property. That 
would sound too harshly yet. But it amounts to that. There 
are thousands of churches in Italy, each with untold million* 
of treasures stored away in its closets, and each with its bat- 
talion of priests to be supported. And then there are the 
estates of the Church — league on league of the richest lands 
and the noblest forests in all Italy — all yielding immense rev- 
enues to the Church, and none paying a cent in taxes to the 
State. In some great districts the Church owns all the prop- 
erty — lands, watercourses, woods, mills and factories. They 
buy, they sell, they manufacture, and since they pay no taxes, 
who can hope to compete with them ? 

Well, the Government has seized all this in effect, and will 
yet seize it in rigid and unpoetical reality, no doubt. Some- 



ECCLESIASTICAL SPLENDOR. 257 

thing must be done to feed a starving treasury, and there is no 
other resource in all Italy — none but the riches of the Church. 
So the Government intends to take to itself a great portion of 
the revenues arising from priestly farms, factories, etc., and 
also intends to take possession of the churches and carry them 
on, after its own fashion and upon its own responsibility. In 
a few instances it will leave the establishments of great pet 
churches undisturbed, but in all others only a handful of 
priests will be retained to preach and pray, a few will be pen- 
sioned, and the balance turned adrift. 

Pray glance at some of these churches and their embellish- 
ments, and see whether the Government is doing a righteous 
thing or not. In Yenice, to-day, a city of a hundred thousand 
inhabitants, there are twelve hundred priests. Heaven only 
knows how many there were before the Parliament reduced their 
numbers. There was the great Jesuit Church. Under the old 
regime it required sixty priests to engineer it — the Govern- 
ment does it with five, now, and the others are discharged 
from service. All about that church wretchedness and poverty 
abound. At its door a dozen hats and bonnets were doffed to 
us, as many heads were humbly bowed, and as many hands ex- 
tended, appealing for pennies — appealing with foreign words 
we could not understand, but appealing mutely, with sad eyes, 
and sunken cheeks, and ragged raiment, that no words were 
needed to translate. Then we passed within the great doors, 
and it seemed that the riches of the world were before us ! 
Huge columns carved out of single masses of marble, and 
inlaid from top to bottom with a hundred intricate figures 
wrought in costly verde antique; pulpits of the same rich 
materials, whose draperies hung down in many a pictured fold, 
the stony fabric counterfeiting the delicate work of the loom ; 
the grand altar brilliant with polished facings and balustrades 
of oriental agate, jasper, verde antique, and other precious 
stones, whose names, ev^en, we seldom hear — and slabs of 
priceless lapis lazuli lavished every where as recklessly as if 
the church had owned a quarry of it. In the midst of all this 
magnificence, the solid gold and silver furniture of the altar 

17 



258 



MAGNIFICENCE AND MISERY 



seemed cheap and trivial. Even the floors and ceilings cost a 
princely fortune. 

Now, where is the use of allowing all those riches to lie idle, 
while half of that community hardly know, from day to day, 
how they are going to keep body and soul together ? And, 
where is the wisdom in permitting hundreds upon hundreds of 
millions of francs to be locked up in the useless trumpery of 
churches all over Italy, and the people ground to death with 
taxation to' uphold a perishing Government ? 

As far as I can see, Italy, for fifteen hundred years, has 
turned all her energies, all her finances, and all her industry 
to the building up of a vast array of wonderful church edifices, 
and starving half her citizens to accomplish it. She is to-day 
one vast museum of magnificence and misery. All the 
churches in an ordinary American city put together could 
hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathe- 
drals. And for every beggar in America, Italy can show a 




THE CONTRAST. 



hundred — and rags and vermin to match. It is the wretched- 
est, princeliest land on earth. 

Look at the grand Duomo of Florence — a vast pile that has 



GENERAL EXECRATION. 259> 

been sapping the purses of her citizens for five hundred years, 
and is not nearly finished yet. Like all other men, I fell down 
and worshipped it, but when the filthy beggars swarmed 
around me the contrast was too striking, too suggestive, and I 
said, " O, sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of enterprise, of 
self-reliance, of noble endeavor, utterly dead within ye ? Curse 
your indolent worthlessness, why don't you rob your church V y 

Three hundred happy, comfortable priests are employed in 
that Cathedral. 

And now that my temper is up, I may as well go on and 
abuse every body I can think of. They have a grand mausoleum 
in Florence, which they built to bury our Lord and Saviour 
and the Medici family in. It sounds blasphemous, but it is 
true, and here they act blasphemy. The dead and damned 
Medicis who cruelly tyrannized over Florence and were her 
curse for over two hundred years, are salted away in a circle 
of costly vaults, and in their midst the Holy Sepulchre was to 
have been set up. The expedition sent to Jerusalem to seize 
it got into trouble and could not accomplish the burglary, and 
so the centre of the mausoleum is vacant now. They say the 
entire mausoleum was intended for the Holy Sepulchre, and 
was only turned into a family burying place after the Jeru- 
salem expedition failed — but you will excuse me. Some of 
those Medicis would have smuggled themselves in sure. — 
What they had not the effrontery to do, was not worth doing. 
Why, they had their trivial, forgotten exploits on land and! 
sea pictured out in grand frescoes (as did also the ancient 
Doges of Venice) with the Saviour and the Virgin throwing 
bouquets to them out of the clouds, and the Deity himself 
applauding from his throne in Heaven ! And who painted 
these things? Why, Titian, Tintoretto, Paul Veronese, 
Raphael — none other than the world's idols, the " old mas- 
ters." 

Andrea del Sarto glorified his princes in pictures that must 
save them for ever from the oblivion they merited, and they let 
him starve. Served him right. Raphael pictured such infernal 
villains as Catherine and Marie de Medicis seated in heaven and 



260 MORE MAGNIFICENCE. 

conversing familiarly with the Virgin Mary and the angels, 
(to say nothing of higher personages,) and yet my friends 
abuse me because I am a little prejudiced against the old 
masters — because I fail sometimes to see the beauty that is in 
their productions. I can not help but see it, now and then, but 
I keep on protesting against the groveling spirit that could 
persuade those masters to prostitute their noble talents to the 
adulation of such monsters as the French, Venetian and Flor- 
entine Princes of two and three hundred years ago, all the 
same. 

I am told that the old masters had to do these shameful 
things for bread, the princes and potentates being the only 
patrons of art. If a grandly gifted man may drag his pride 
and his manhood in the dirt for bread rather than starve witk 
the nobility that is in him untainted, the excuse is a valid one. 
It would excuse theft in Washingtons and Wellingtons, and 
unchastity in women as well. 

But somehow, I can not keep that Medici mausoleum out of 
my memory. It is as large as a church ; its pavement is rick 
enough for the pavement of a King's palace ; its great dom« 
is gorgeous with frescoes ; its walls are made of — what ? Mar- 
ble? — plaster? — wood? — paper? "No. Red porphyry — verde 
antique — jasper — oriental agate — alabaster — mother-of-pearl — 
chalcedony — red coral — lapis lazuli! All the vast walls are 
made wholly of these precious stones, worked in, and in and in to- 
gether in elaborate patterns and figures, and polished till they 
glow like great mirrors with the pictured splendors reflected from 
the dome overhead. And before a statue of one of those dead 
Medicis reposes a crown that blazes with diamonds and emer- 
alds enough to buy a ship-of-the-line, almost. These are the 
things the Government has its evil eye upon, and a happy 
thing it will be for Italy when they melt away in the public 
treasury. 

And now — . However, another beggar approaches. I will 
go out and destroy him, and then come back and write another 
chapter of vituperation. 

Having eaten the friendless orphan — having driven away hi§ 



A GOOD WORD FOR THE PRIESTS. 261 

comrades — having grown calm and reflective at length — I now 
feel in a kindlier mood. I feel that after talking so freely 
about the priests and the churches, justice demands that if I 
know any thing good about either I ought to say it. I have 
heard of many things that redound to the credit of the priest- 
hood, but the most notable matter that occurs to me now is 
the devotion one of the mendicant orders showed during the 
prevalence of the cholera last year. I speak of the Dominican 
friars — men who wear a coarse, heavy brown robe and a cowl, 
in this hot climate, and go barefoot. They live on alms alto- 
gether, I believe. They must unquestionably love their reli- 
gion, to suffer so much for it. When the cholera was raging 
in Naples ; when the people were dying by hundreds and hun- 
dreds every day ; when every concern for the public welfare 
was swallowed up in selfish private interest, and every citizen 
made the taking care of himself his sole object, these men 
banded themselves together and went about nursing the sick 
and burying the dead. Their noble efforts cost many of them 
their lives. They laid them down cheerfully, and well they 
might. Creeds mathematically precise, and hair-splitting nice- 
ties of doctrine, are absolutely necessary for the salvation of 
some kinds of souls, but surely the charity, the purity, the 
unselfishness that are in the hearts of men like these would 
save their souls though they were bankrupt in the true religion 
—which is ours. 

One of these fat bare-footed rascals came here to Civita Yec- 
chia with us in the little French steamer. There were only 
half a dozen of us in the cabin. He belonged in the steerage. 
He was the life of the ship, the bloody-minded son of the 
Inquisition ! He and the leader of the marine band of a 
French man-of-war played on the piano and sang opera turn 
about; they sang duets together; they rigged impromptu 
theatrical costumes and gave us extravagant farces and panto- 
mimes. We got along first-rate with the friar, and were exces- 
sively conversational, albeit he could not understand what we 
said, and certainly he never uttered a word that we could 
guess the meaning of. 



262 CIVITA VECCHIA THE DISMAL. 

This Civita Yecckia is the finest nest of dirt, vermin and 
ignorance we have found yet, except that African perdition 
they call Tangier, which is just like it. The people here live 
in alleys two yards wide, which have a smell about them which 
is peculiar but not entertaining. It is well the alleys are not 
wider, because they hold as much smell now as a person can 
stand, and of course, if they were wider they would hold more, 
and then the people would die. These alleys are paved with 
stone, and carpeted with deceased cats, and decayed rags, and 
decomposed vegetable-tops, and remnants of old boots, all 
soaked with dish-water, and the people sit around on stools 
and enjoy it. They are indolent, as a general thing, and yet 
have few pastimes. They work two or three hours at a time, 
but not hard, and then they knock off and catch flies. This 
does not require any talent, because they only have to grab— 
if they do not get the one they are after, they get another. It 
is all the same to them. They have no partialities. Which- 
ever one they get is the one they want. 

They have other kinds of insects, but it does not make them 
arrogant. They are very quiet, unpretending people. They 
have more of these kind of things than other communities, but 
they do not boast. 

They are very uncleanly — these people — in face, in person 
and dress. When they see any body with a clean shirt on, 
it arouses their scorn. The women wash clothes, half the day, 
at the public tanks in the streets, but they are probably some- 
tody else's. Or may be they keep one set to wear and another 
to wash ; because they never put on any that have ever been 
washed. When they get done washing, they sit in the alleys 
and nurse their cubs. They nurse one ash-cat at a time, and 
the others scratch their backs against the door-post and are 
happy. 

All this country belongs to the Papal States. They do not 
appear to have any schools here, and only one billiard table. 
Their education is at a very low stage. One portion of the 
men go into the military, another into the priesthood, and the 
rest into the shoe-making business. 



CI VITA VECCHIA THE DISMAL. 



263 



They keep up the passport system here, but so they do in 
Turkey. This shows that the Papal States are as far advanced 
as Turkey. This fact will be alone sufficient to silence the 




ITALIAN PASTIMES. 



tongues of malignant calumniators. I had to get my passport 
vised for Rome in Florence, and then they would not let me 
come ashore here until a policeman had examined it on the 
wharf and sent me a permit. They did not even dare to let 
me take my passport in my hands for twelve hours, I looked 
so formidable. They judged it best to let me cool down. 
They thought I wanted to take the town, likely. Little did 
they know me. I wouldn't have it. They examined my bag- 
gage at the depot. They took one of my ablest jokes and 
read it over carefully twice and then read it backwards. But 
it was too deep for them. They passed it around, and every 
body speculated on it awhile, but it mastered them all. 

It was no common joke. At length a veteran officer spelled 
it over deliberately and shook his head three or four times and 
said that in his opinion it was seditious. That was the first 
time I felt alarmed. I immediately said I would explain the 
document, and they crowded around. And so I explained and 



264 



CIVITA VECCHIA THE DISMAL 



explained and explained, and they took notes of all I said, but the 
more I explained the more they could not understand it, and when 
they desisted at last, I could not even understand it myself. 




INCENDIARY DOCUMENT. 



They said they believed it was an incendiary document, 
leveled at the government. I declared solemnly that it was 
not, but they only shook their heads and would not be satis- 
fied. Then they consulted a good while ; and finally they con- 
fiscated it. I was very sorry for this, because I had worked a 
long time on that joke, and took a good deal of pride in it, 
and now I suppose I shall never see it any more. I suppose it 
will be sent up and filed away among the criminal archives of 
Rome, and will always be regarded as a mysterious infernal 
machine which would have blown up like a mine and scattered 
the good Pope all around, but for a miraculous providential 
interference. And I suppose that all the time I am in Rome 
the police will dog me about from place to place because they 
think I am a dangerous character. 



OFF FOR EOME. 265 

It is fearfully hot in Civita Vecchia. The streets are made 
very narrow and the houses built very solid and heavy and 
high, as a protection against the heat. This is the first Italian 
town I have seen which does not appear to have a patron 
saint. I suppose no saint but the one that went up in the 
chariot of fire could stand the climate. 

There is nothing here to see. They have not even a cathe- 
dral, with eleven tons of solid silver archbishops in the back 
room; and they do not show you any moldy buildings that 
are seven thousand years old ; nor any smoke-dried old fire- 
screens which are chef d'oeuvres of Reubens or Simpson, or 
Titian or Ferguson, or any of those parties ; and they haven't 
any bottled fragments of saints, and not even a nail from the 
true cross. We are going to Rome. There is nothing to see 
here. 



OHAPTEE XXVI. 

WHAT is it that confers the noblest delight ? "What is 
that which swells a man's breast with pride above that 
which any other experience can bring to hirn ? Discovery ! To 
know that you are walking where none others have walked ; 
that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before ; 
that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to 
an idea — to discover a great thought — an intellectual nugget, 
right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plow had 
gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new 
hinge, to find the way to make the lightnings carry your 
messages. To be the first — that is the idea. To do some- 
thing, say something, see something, before any body else — 
these are the things that confer a pleasure compared with 
which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecsta- 
sies cheap and trivial. Morse, with his first message, brought 
by his servant, the lightning ; Fulton, in that long-drawn cen- 
tury of suspense, when he placed his hand upon the throttle- 
valve and lo, the steamboat moved ; Jenner, when his patient 
with the cow's virus in his blood, walked through the small- 
pox hospitals unscathed ; Howe, when the idea shot through 
his brain that for a hundred and twenty generations the eye 
had been bored through the wrong end of the needle ; the 
nameless lord of art who laid down his chisel in some old age 
that is forgotten, now, and gloated upon the finished Laocoon ; 
Daguerre, when he commanded the sun, riding in the zenith, 
to prin f the landscape upon his insignificant silvered plate, and 



THE MODERN ROMAN TRAVELETH. 



267 



he obeyed ; Columbus, in the Pinta's shrouds, when he swung 
his hat above a fabled sea and gazed abroad upon an unknown 
world ! These are the men who have really lived — who have 
actually comprehended what pleasure is — who have crowded 
long lifetimes of ecstasy into a single moment. 

"What is there in Rome for me to see that others have not 
seen before me ? What is there for me to touch that others 
have not touched ? "What is there for me to feel, to learn, to 
hear, to know, that shall thrill me before it pass to others ? 
What can I discover ? — Nothing. Noth- 
ing whatsoever. One charm of travel 
dies here. But if I were only a Ro- 
man ! — If, added to my own I could be 
gifted with modern Roman sloth, mod- 
ern Roman superstition, and modern 
Roman boundlessness of ignorance, 
what bewildering worlds of unsus- 
pected wonders I would discover ! Ah, 
if I were only a habitant of the Cam- 
pagna five and twenty miles from 
Rome ! Then I would travel. 

I would go to America, and see, and 
learn, and return to the Campagna and 
stand before my countrymen an illus- 
trious discoverer. I would say : 

" I saw there a country which has no 
overshadowing Mother Church, and yet 

the people survive. I saw a government which never was 
protected by foreign soldiers at a cost greater than that re- 
quired to carry on the government itself. I saw common men 
and common women who could read ; I even saw small chil- 
dren of common country people reading from books ; if I dared 
think you would believe it, I would say they could write, also. 
In the cities I saw people drinking a delicious beverage made 
of chalk and water, but never once saw goats driven through 
their Broadway or their Pennsylvania Avenue or their Mont- 
gomery street and milked at the doors of the houses. I saw 




A ROMAN OF 1869. 



268 THE MODERN ROMAN TRAVELETH. 

real glass windows in the houses of even the commonest people. 
Some of the houses are not of stone, nor yet of bricks ; I sol- 
emnly swear they are made of wood. Houses there will tak* 
fire and burn, sometimes — actually burn entirely down, and 
not leave a single vestige behind. I could state that for a 
truth, upon my death-bed. And as a proof that the circum- 
stance is not rare, I aver that they have a thing which they 
Ball a fire-engine, which vomits forth great streams of water, 
and is kept always in readiness, by night and by day, to rush 
to houses that are burning. You would think one engine 
would be sufficient, but some great cities have a hundred ; 
they keep men hired, and pay them by the month to do nothing 
but put out fires. For a certain sum of money other men will 
Insure that your house shall not burn down ; and if it burns 
they will pay you for it. There are hundreds and thousands 
Df schools, and any body may go and learn to be wise, like a 
priest. In that singular country if a rich man dies a sinner, he 
is damned ; he can not buy salvation with money for masses. 
There is really not much use in being rich, there. Not much 
use as far as the other world is concerned, but much, very 
much use, as concerns this ; because there, if a man be rich, he 
is very greatly honored, and can become a legislator, a govern- 
or, a general, a senator, no matter how ignorant an ass he is — 
just as in our beloved Italy the nobles hold all the great places, 
even though sometimes they are born noble idiots. There, if 
a man be rich, they give him costly presents, they ask him to 
feasts, they invite him to drink complicated beverages ; but if 
he be poor and in debt, they require him to do that which 
they term to " settle." The women put on a different dress 
almost every day ; the dress is usually fine, but absurd in 
shape ; the very shape and fashion of it changes twice in a 
hundred years ; and did I but covet to be called an extrava- 
gant falsifier, I would say it changed even oftener. Hair does 
not grow upon the American women's heads ; it is made for 
them by cunning workmen in the shops, and is curled and 
frizzled into scandalous and ungodly forms. Some persons 
wear eyes of glass which they see through with facility per- 



THE MODERN' ROMAN TRAVELETH. 269 

haps, else they would not use them ; and in the mouths of 
some are teeth made by the sacrilegious hand of man. The 
dress of the men is laughably grotesque. They carry no 
musket in ordinary life, nor no long-pointed pole ; they wear 
no wide green-lined cloak; they wear no peaked black felt 
hat, no leathern gaiters reaching to the knee, no goat-skin 
breeches with the hair side out, no hob-nailed shoes, no pro- 
digious spurs. They wear a conical hat termed a " nail-kag ;" 
a coat of saddest black ; a shirt which shows dirt so easily that 
it has to be changed every month, and is very troublesome ; 
things called pantaloons, which are held up by shoulder 
straps, and on their feet they wear boots which are ridiculous 
in pattern and can stand no wear. Yet dressed in this fan- 
tastic garb, these people laughed at my costume. In that 
country, books are so common that it is really no curiosity to 
see one. Newspapers also. They have a great machine which 
prints such things by thousands every hour. 

" I saw common men, there— men who were neither priests 
nor princes — who yet absolutely owned the land they tilled. 
It was not rented from the church, nor from the nobles. I am 
ready to take my oath of this. In that country you might fall 
from a third story window three several times, and not mash 
either a soldier or a priest. — The scarcity of such people is 
astonishing. In the cities you will see a dozen civilians for 
every soldier, and as many for every priest or preacher. Jews, 
there, are treated just like human beings, instead of dogs. 
They can work at any business they please ; they can sell 
brand new goods if they want to ; they can keep drug-stores ; 
they can practice medicine among Christians ; they can even 
shake hands with Christians if they choose ; they can associate 
with them, just the same as one human being does with 
another human being ; they don't have to stay shut up in one 
corner of the towns ; they can live in any part of a town they 
like best ; it is said they even have the privilege of buying 
land and houses, and owning them themselves, though I doubt 
that, myself; they never have had to run races naked through 
the public streets, against jackasses, to please the people in 



270 THE MODERN ROMAN TRAVELETH. 

carnival time; there they never have been driven by the 
soldiers into a church every Sunday for hundreds of years to 
hear themselves and their religion especially and particularly 
cursed ; at this very day, in that curious country, a Jew is 
allowed to vote, hold office, yea, get up on a rostrum in the 
public street and express his opinion of the government if the 
government don't suit him ! Ah, it is wonderful. The com- 
mon people there know a great deal; they even have the 
effrontery to complain if they are not properly governed, and 
to take hold and help conduct the government themselves ; if 
they had laws like ours, which give one dollar of every three a 
crop produces to the government for taxes, they would have 
that law altered : instead of paying thirty-three dollars in 
taxes, out of every one hundred they receive, they complain if 
they have to pay seven. They are curious people. They do 
not know when they are well off. Mendicant priests do not 
prowl among them with baskets begging for the church and 
eating up their substance. One hardly ever sees a minister of 
the gospel going around there in his bare feet, with a basket, 
begging for subsistence. In that country the preachers are not 
like our mendicant orders of friars — they have two or three 
suits of clothing, and they wash sometimes. In that land are 
mountains far higher than the Alban mountains ; the vast 
Roman Campagna, a hundred miles long and full forty broad, 
is really small compared to the United States of America ; the 
Tiber, that celebrated river of ours, which stretches its mighty 
course almost two hundred miles, and which a lad can scarcely 
throw a stone across at Rome, is not so long, nor yet so wide, as 
the American Mississippi — nor yet the Ohio, nor even the Hud- 
son. In America the people are absolutely wiser and know much 
more than their grandfathers did. They do not plow with a sharp- 
ened stick, nor yet with a three-cornered block of wood that 
merely scratches the top of the ground. We do that because 
our fathers did, three thousand years ago, I suppose. But 
those people have no holy reverence for their ancestors. They 
plow with a plow that is a sharp, curved blade of iron, and it 
cuts into the earth full five inches. And this is not all. They 



THE GRANDEUR OF ST. PETER'S. 271 

cut their grain with a horrid machine that mows down whole 
fields in a day. If I dared, I would say that sometimes they 
use a blasphemous plow that works by fire and vapor and 
tears up an acre of ground in a single hour — but; — but — I see 
by your looks that you do not believe the things I am telling 
you. Alas, my character is ruined, and I am a branded 
speaker of untruths I" 

Of course we have been to the monster Church of St. Peter, 
frequently. I knew its dimensions. I knew it was a prodigious 
structure. I knew it was just about the length of the capitol at 
Washington — say seven hundred and thirty feet. I knew it was 
three hundred and sixty-four feet wide, and consequently wider 
than the capitol. I knew that the cross on the top of the dome 
of the church was four hundred and thirty-eight feet above the 
ground, and therefore about a hundred or may be a hundred and 
twenty-five feet higher than the dome of the capitol. — Thus I had 
one gauge. I wished to come as near forming a correct idea of 
how it was going to look, as possible ; I had a curiosity to see 
how much I would err. I erred considerably. St. Peter's did 
not look nearly so large as the capitol, and certainly not a 
twentieth part as beautiful, from the outside. 

When we reached the door, and stood fairly within the 
church, it was impossible to comprehend that it was a very 
large building. I had to cipher a comprehension of it. I had 
to ransack my memory for some more similes. St. Peter's is 
bulky. Its height and size would represent two of the Wash- 
ington capitol set one on top of the other — if the capitol were 
wider ; or two blocks or two blocks and a half of ordinary build- 
ings set one on top of the other. St. Peter's was that large, but 
it could and would not look so. The trouble was that every thing 
in it and about it was on such a scale of uniform vastness that 
there were no contrasts to judge by — none but the people, and 
I had not noticed them. They were insects. The statues of 
children holding vases of holy water were immense, according 
to the tables of figures, but so was every thing else around 
them. The mosaic pictures in the dome were huge, and were 
made of thousands and thousands of cubes of glass as large as 



272 THE GRANDEUR OF ST. 

the end of my little finger, but those pictures looked smooth, 
and gaudy of color, and in good proportion to the dome. Evi- 
dently they would not answer to measure by. Away down 
toward the far end of the church (I thought it was really clew 
at the far end, but discovered afterward that it was in the centre, 
under the dome,) stood the thing they call the baldacchino — a 
great bronze pyramidal frame-work like that which upholds a 
mosquito bar. It only looked like a considerably magnified bed- 
stead — nothing more. Yet I knew it was a good deal more 
than half as high as Niagara Falls. It was overshadowed by a 
dome so mighty that its own height was snubbed. The four 
great square piers or pillars that stand equidistant from each 
other in the church, and support the roof, I could not work up 
to their real dimensions by any method of comparison. I 
knew that the faces of each were about the width of a very 
large dwelling-house front, (fifty or sixty feet,) and that thej" 
were twice as high as an ordinary three-story dwelling, but 
still they looked small. I tried all the different ways I could 
think of to compel myself to understand how large St. Peter's 
was, but with small success. The mosaic portrait of an Apostle 
who was writing with a pen six feet long seemed only an ordi- 
nary Apostle. 

But the people attracted my attention after a while. To 
stand in the door of St. Peter's and look at men down toward 
its further extremity, two blocks away, has a diminishing effect 
on them ; surrounded by the prodigious pictures and statues, 
and lost in the vast spaces, they look very much smaller than 
they would if they stood two blocks away in the open air. I 
" averaged " a man as he passed me and watched. him as he 
drifted far down by the baldacchino and beyond — watched 
him dwindle to an insignificant school-boy, and then, in 
the midst of the silent throng of human pigmies gliding 
about him, I lost him. The church had lately been dec- 
orated, on the occasion of a great ceremony in honor of 
St. Peter, and men were engaged, now, in removing the 
flowers and gilt paper from the walls and pillars. As no 
ladders could reach the great heights, the men swung them- 



HOLY RELICS. 273 

selves down from balustrades and the capitals of pilasters by 
ropes, to do this work. The upper gallery which encircles the 
inner sweep of the dome is two hundred and forty feet above 
the floor of the church — very few steeples in America could 
reach up to it. Visitors always go up there to look down 
into the church because one gets the best idea of some of the 
heights and distances from that point. While we stood on the 
floor one of the workmen swung loose from that gallery at the 
end of a long rope. I had not supposed, before, that a man 
could look so much like a spider. He was insignificant in size, 
and his rope seemed only a thread. Seeing that he took up so 
little space, I could believe the story, then, that ten thousand 
troops went to St. Peter's, once, to hear mass, and their com- 
manding officer came afterward, and not finding them, sup- 
posed they had not yet arrived. But they were in the church, 
nevertheless — they were in one of the transepts. Nearly fifty 
thousand persons assembled in St. Peter's to hear the publish- 
ing of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. It is esti- 
mated that the floor of the church affords standing room for — 
for a large number of people ; I have forgotten the exact fig- 
ures. But it is no matter — it is near enough. 

They have twelve small pillars, in St. Peter's, which came 
from Solomon's Temple. They have, also — which was far 
more interesting to me — a piece of the true cross, and some 
nails, and a part of the crown of thorns. 

Of course we ascended to the summit of the dome, and of 
course we also went up into the gilt copper ba ! which is above 
it. — There was room there for a dozen pern ns, with a little 
crowding, and it was as close and hot as an oven. Some of 
those people who are so fond of writing their names in promi- 
nent places had been there before us — a million or two, I 
should think. From the dome of St. Peter's one can see every 
notable object in Rome, from the Castle of St. Angelo to the 
Coliseum. He can discern the seven hills upon which Pome 
is built. He can see the Tiber, and the locality of the bridge 
which Horatius kept " in the brave days of old " when Lara 
Porsena attempted to cross it with his invading host. He can 

18 



274 A RENOWNED PANORAMA. 

see the spot where the Horatii and the Curatii fought their 
famous battle. He can see the broad green Campagna, stretch- 
ing away toward the mountains, with its scattered arches and 
broken aqueducts of the olden time, so picturesque in their 
gray ruin, and so daintily festooned with vines. He can see 
the Alban Mountains, the Appenines, the Sabine Hills, and 
the blue Mediterranean. He can see a panorama that is 
varied, extensive, beautiful to the eye, and more illustrious in 
history than any other in Europe. — About his feet is spread 
the remnant of a city that once had a population of four 
million souls ; and among its massed edifices stand the ruins 
of temples, columns, and triumphal arches that knew the 
Caesars, and the noonday of Roman splendor; and close by 
them, in unimpaired strength, is a drain of arched and heavy 
masonry that belonged to that older city which stood here 
before Romulus and Remus were born or Rome thought of. 
The Appian Way is here yet, and looking much as it did, per- 
haps, when the triumphal processions of the Emperors moved 
over it in other days bringing fettered princes from the con- 
fines of the earth. We can not see the long array of chariots 
and mail-clad men laden with the spoils of conquest, but we 
can imagine the pageant, after a fashion. We look out upon 
many objects of interest from the dome of St. Peter's ; and 
last of all, almost at our feet, our eyes rest upon the building 
which was once the Inquisition. How times changed, between 
the older ages and the new ! Some seventeen or eighteen cen- 
turies ago, the gnorant men of Rome were wont to put Chris- 
tians in the aiona of the Coliseum yonder, and turn the wild 
beasts in upon them for a show. It was for a lesson as well. 
It was to teach the people to abhor and fear the new doctrine 
the followers of Christ were teaching. The beasts tore the 
victims limb from limb and made poor mangled corpses of 
them in the twinkling of an eye. But when the Christians 
came into power , when the holy Mother Church became mis- 
tress of the barbarians, she taught them the error of their ways 
by no such means. No, she put them in this pleasant Inquisi- 
tion and pointed to the Blessed Redeemer, who was so gentle 



OLD MONKISH FRAUDS. 275 

and so merciful toward all men, and they urged the barbarians 
to love him ; and they did all they could to persuade them to 
love and honor him — first by twisting their thumbs out of 
joint with a screw ; then by nipping their flesh with pincers — 
red-hot ones, because they are the most comfortable in cold 
weather ; then by skinning them alive a little, and finally by 
roasting them in public. They always convinced those barba- 
rians. The true religion, properly administered, as the good 
Mother Church used to administer it, is very, very soothing. It 
is wonderfully persuasive, also. There is a great difference 
between feeding parties to wild beasts and stirring up their 
finer feelings in an Inquisition. One is the system of degraded 
barbarians, the other of enlightened, civilized people. It is a 
great pity the playful Inquisition is no more. 

I prefer not to describe St. Peter's. It has been done 
before. The ashes of Peter, the disciple of the Saviour, repose 
in a crypt under the baldacchino. We stood reverently in that 
place ; so did we also in the Mamertine Prison, where he was 
confined, where he converted the soldiers, and where tradition 
says he caused a spring of water to flow in order that he might 
baptize them. But when they showed us the print of Peter's 
face in the hard stone of the prison wall and said he made that 
by falling up against it, we doubted. And when, also, the 
monk at the church of San Sebastian showed us a paving-stone 
with two great footprints in it and said that Peter's feet made 
those, we lacked confidence again. Such things do not impress 
one. The monk said that angels came and liberated Peter 
from prison by night, and he started away from Pome by the 
Appian Way. The Saviour met him and told him to go back, 
which he did. Peter left those footprints in the stone upon 
which he stood at the time. It was not stated how it was ever 
discovered whose footprints they were, seeing the interview 
occurred secretly and at night. The print of the face in the 
prison was that of a man of common size ; the footprints were 
those of a man ten or twelve feet high. The discrepancy con- 
firmed our unbelief. 

We necessarily visited the Forum, where Caesar was assassi- 



276 



THE KUINED COLISEUM. 



nated, and also the Tarpeian Eock. We saw the Dying Gla- 
diator at the Capitol, and I think that even we appreciated that 
wonder of art ; as much, perhaps, as we did that fearful story 




wrought in marble, in the 
Vatican — the Laocoon. And 
then the Coliseum. 

Every body knows the pic 
ture of the Coliseum : everv 
body recognizes at once that 
" looped and windowed " band- 
box with a side bitten out. 
Being rather isolated, it shows 
to better advantage than any other of the monuments of ancient 
Rome. Even the beautiful Pantheon, whose pagan altars uphold 
the cross, now, and whose Yenus, tricked out in consecrated 
gimcracks, does reluctant duty as a Virgin Mary to-day, is built 
about with shabby houses and its stateliness sadly marred. 
But the monarch of all European ruins, the Coliseum, main- 
tains that reserve and that royal seclusion which is proper to 
majesty. Weeds and flowers spring from its massy arches and 
its circling seats, and vines hang their fringes from its lofty 



THE RUINED COLISEUM. 27T 

walls. An impressive silence broods over the monstrous struc- 
ture where such multitudes of men and women were wont to. 
assemble in other days. The butterflies have taken the places* 
of the queens of fashion and beauty of eighteen centuries ago r 
and the lizards sun themselves in the sacred seat of the Empe- 
ror. More vividly than all the written histories, the Coliseum 
tells the story of Rome's grandeur and Rome's decay. It is 
the worthiest type of both that exists. Moving about the 
Rome of to-day, we might find it hard to believe in her old 
magnificence and her millions of population ; but with this 
stubborn evidence before us that she was obliged to have a 
theatre with sitting room for eighty thousand persons and 
standing room for twenty thousand more, to accommodate such 
of her citizens as required amusement, we find belief less diffi- 
cult. The Coliseum is over one thousand six hundred feet 
long, seven hundred and fifty wide, and one hundred and sixty- 
five high. Its shape is oval. 

In America we make convicts useful at the same time that 
we punish them for their crimes. We farm them out and 
compel them to earn money for the State by making barrels- 
and building roads. Thus we combine business with retribu- 
tion, and all things are lovely. But in ancient Rome they 
combined religious duty with pleasure. Since it was necessary- 
that the new sect called Christians should be exterminated, the 
people judged it wise to make this work profitable to the State 
at the same time, and entertaining to the public. In addition 
to the gladiatorial combats and other shows, they sometimes 
threw members of the hated sect into the arena of the Coliseum 
and turned wild beasts in upon them. It is estimated that 
seventy thousand Christians suffered martyrdom in this place. 
This has made the Coliseum holy ground, in the eyes of the 
followers of the Saviour. And well it might ; for if the chain 
that bound a saint, and the footprints a saint has left upon a 
stone he chanced to stand upon, be holy, surely the spot where 
a man gave up his life for his faith is holy. 

Seventeen or eighteen centuries ago this Coliseum was the 
theatre of Rome, and Rome was mistress of the world. Splen- 



278 



THE COLISEUM IN ITS PRIME. 



did pageants were exhibited here, in presence of the Emperor^ 
the great ministers of State, the nobles, and vast audiences of 
citizens of smaller consequence. Gladiators fought with gla- 
diators and at times with warrior prisoners from many a 
distant land. It was the theatre of Rome — of the world — 
and the man of fashion who could not let fall in a casual 
and unintentional manner something about " my private box 
at the Coliseum " could not move in the first circles. When 
the clothing-store merchant wished to consume the corner 
grocery man with envy, he bought secured seats in the front 
row and let the thing be known. When the irresistible 
dry goods clerk wished to blight and destroy, according to his 
native instinct, he got himself up regardless of expense and 
took some other fellow's young lady to the Coliseum, and then 

accented the affront by cramming her 
with ice cream between the acts, or 
by approaching the cage and stirring 
up the martyrs with his whalebone 
cane for her edification. The Roman 
swell was in his true element only 
when he stood up against a pillar and 
fingered his moustache unconscious 
of the ladies ; when he viewed the 
bloody combats through an opera- 
glass two inches long ; when he ex- 
cited the envy of provincials by crit- 
icisms which showed that he had 
been to the Coliseum many and 
many a time and was long ago over 
the novelty of it ; when he turned 
away with a yawn at last and said, 

" He a star ! handles his sword like 

an apprentice brigand ! he'll do for 

the country, maybe, but he don't answer for the metropolis !" 

Glad was the contraband that had a seat in the pit at the 

Saturday matinee, and happy the Roman street-boy who ate 

his peanuts and guyed the gladiators from the dizzy gallery. 




OLD ROMAN. 



A PLAYBILL 1700 YEARS OLD. 279 

For me was reserved the high honor of discovering among 
the rubbish of the ruined Coliseum the only playbill of that 
establishment now extant. There was a suggestive smell of 
mint-drops about it still, a corner of it had evidently been 
chewed, and on the margin, in choice Latin, these words were 
written in a delicate female hand : 

" Meet me on the Tarpeian Rock to-morrow evening, dear, at sharp seven. Mother 
mU be absent on a visit to her friends in the Sabine Hills. 

Claudia." 

Ah, where is that lucky youth to-day, and where the little 
hand that wrote those dainty lines ? Dust and ashes these 
seventeen hundred years ! 

Thus reads the bill : 



ROMAN COLISEUM. 

UNPARALLELED ATTRACTION! 

NEW PROPERTIES! NEW LIONS! NEW GLADIATORS! 

Engagement of the renowned 
MARCUS MARCELLUS VALERIAN! 

FOR SIX NIGHTS ONLY! 

The management beg leave to offer to the public an entertainment surpassing in 
magnificence any thing that has heretofore been attempted on any stage. No 
expense has been spared to make the opening season one which shall be worthy the 
generous patronage which the management feel sure will crown their efforts. The 
management beg leave to state that they have succeeded in securing the services 
of a 

GALAXY OF TALENT! 

such as has not been beheld in Rome before. 

The performance will commence this evening with a 

GRAND BROADSWORD COMBAT! 

between two young and promising amateurs and a celebrated Parthian gladiator 
who has just arrived a prisoner from the Camp of Yerus. 
This will be followed by a grand moral 

BATTLE-AX ENGAGEMENT* 



280 A PLAYBILL 1700 YEARS OLD. 

between the renowned Valerian (with one hand tied behind him,) and two gigantic 
savages from Britain. • 

After which the renowned Valerian (if he survive,) will fight with the broad- 
sword, 

LEFT-HANDED ! 

against six Sophomores and a Freshman from the Gladiatorial College ! 

A long series of brilliant engagements will follow, in which the finest talent of 
the Empire will take part. 

After which the celebrated Infant Prodigy known as 

"THE YOUNG ACHILLES," 

will engage four tiger whelps in combat, armed with no other weapon than his little 
spear ! 

The whole to conclude with a chaste and elegant 

GENERAL SLAUGHTER! 

In which thirteen African Lions and twenty -two Barbarian Prisoners will war with 
each other until all are exterminated 

BOX OFFICE NOW OPEN. 

Dress Circle One Dollar ; Children and Servants half price. 

An efficient police force will be on hand to preserve order and keep the wild 
beasts from leaping the railings and discommoding the audience. 
Doors open at 7 • performance begins at 8. 
Positively no Free List. 

Diodorus Job Press. 



It was as singular as it was gratifying that I was also so 
fortunate as to find among the rubbish of the arena, a stained 
and mutilated copy of the Roman Daily Battle-Ax, containing 
a critique upon this very performance. It comes to hand too 
late by many centuries to rank as news, and therefore I trans- 
late and publish it simply to show how very little the general 
style and phraseology of dramatic criticism has altered in the 
ages that have dragged their slow length along since the car- 
riers laid this one damp and fresh before their Eoman patrons : 



"The Opening Season. — Coliseum. — Notwithstanding the inclemency of the 
weather, quite a respectable number of the rank and fashion of the city assembled 
last night to witness the debut upon metropolitan boards of the young tragedian 



ANCIENT ROMAN NEWSPAPER CRITIQUE. 281 

who has of late been winning such golden opinions in the amphitheatres of the 
provinces. Some sixty thousand persons were present, and but for the fact that the 
streets were almost impassable, it is fair to presume that the house would have been 
full. His august Majesty, the Emperor Aurelius, occupied the imperial box, and 
was the cynosure of all eyes. Many illustrious nobles and generals of the Empire 
graced the occasion with their presence, and not the least among them was the 
young patrician lieutenant whose laurels, won in the ranks of the " Thundering 
Legion," are still so green upon his brow. The cheer which greeted his entrance 
was heard beyond the Tiber! 

" The late repairs and decorations add both to the comeliness and the comfort of 
the Coliseum. The new cushions are a great improvement upon the hard marble 
seats we have been so long accustomed to. The present management deserve well 
of the public. They have restored to the Coliseum the gilding, the rich upholstery 




COLISEUM OF ANCIENT ROME. 



and the uniform magnificence which old Coliseum frequenters tell us Rome 
proud of fifty years ago. 



282 ANCIENT ROMAN NEWSPAPER CRITIQUE. 

"The opening scene last night — the broadsword combat between two young 
amateurs and a famous Parthian gladiator who was sent here a prisoner — was very 
fine. The elder of the two young gentlemen handled his weapon with a grace that 
marked the possession of extraordinary talent. His feint of thrusting, followed 
instantly by a happily delivered blow which unhelmeted the Parthian, was received 
with hearty applause. He was not thoroughly up in the backhanded stroke, but 
it was very gratifying to his numerous friends to know that, in time, practice would 
have overcome this defect. However, he was killed. His sisters, who were present, 
expressed considerable regret. His mother left the Coliseum. The other youth 
maintained the contest with such spirit as to call forth enthusiastic bursts of 
applause. When at last he fell a corpse, his aged mother ran screaming, with hair 
disheveled and tears streaming from her eyes, and swooned away just as her hands 
were clutching at the railings of the arena. She was promptly removed by the 
police. Under the circumstances the woman's conduct was pardonable, perhaps, 
but we suggest that such exhibitions interfere with the decorum which should be 
preserved during the performances, and are highly improper in the presence of the 
Emperor. The Parthian prisoner fought bravely and well; and well he might, for 
he was fighting for both life and liberty. His wife and children were there to nerve 
his arm with their love, and to remind him of the old home he should see again if 
he conquered. When his second assailant fell, the woman clasped her children to 
her breast and wept for joy. But it was only a transient happiness. The captive 
staggered toward her and she saw that the liberty he had earned was earned too 
late. He was wounded uuto death. Thus the first act closed in a manner whick 
was entirely satisfactory. The manager was called before the curtain and returned 
his thanks for the honor done him, in a speech which was replete with wit and 
humor, and closed by hoping that his humble efforts to afford cheerful and instruc- 
tive entertainment would continue to meet with the approbation of the Romaa 
public. 

" The star now appeared, and was received with vociferous applause and the 
simultaneous waving of sixty thousand handkerchiefs. Marcus Marcellus Valerian 
(stage name — his real name is Smith,) is a splendid specimen of physical develop- 
ment, and an artist of rare merit. His management of the battle-ax is wonderful. 
His gayety and his playfulness are irresistible, in his comic parts, and yet they are 
inferior to his sublime conceptions in the grave realm of tragedy. When his ax was 
describing fiery circles about the heads of the bewildered barbarians, in exact time 
with his springing body and his prancing legs, the audience gave way to uncon- 
trollable bursts of laughter; but when the back of his weapon broke the skull of 
one and almost in the same instant its edge clove the other's body in twain, the 
howl of enthusiastic applause that shook the building, was the acknowledgment of 
a critical assemblage that he was a master of the noblest department of his profes- 
sion. If he has a fault, (and we are sorry to even intimate that he has,) it is that 
of glancing at the audience, in the midst of the most exciting moments of the per- 
formance, as if seeking admiration. The pausing in a fight to bow when bouquets 
are thrown to him is also in bad taste. In the great left-handed combat he appeared 
to be looking at the audience half the time, instead of carving his adversaries; and 
when he had slain all the sophomores and was dallying with the freshman, h« 



ANCIENT ROMAN NEWSPAPER CRITIQUE. 283 

stooped and snatched a bouquet as it fell, and offered it to his adversary at a time 
•when a blow was descending which promised favorably to be his death-warrant 
Such levity is proper enough in the provinces, we make no doubt, but it ill suits the 
dignity of the metropolis. We trust our young friend will take these remarks in 
good part, for we mean them solely for his benefit. All who know us are aware 
that although we are at times justly severe upon tigers and martyrs, we never in- 
tentionally offend gladiators. 

"The Infant Prodigy performed wonders. He overcame his four tiger whelps 
with ease, and with no other hurt than the loss of a portion of his scalp. The Gen- 
eral Slaughter was rendered with a faithfulness to details which reflects the highest 
•redit upon the late participants in it. 

" Upon the whole, last night's performances shed honor not only upon the man- 
agement but upon the city that encourages and sustains such wholesome and 
instructive entertainments. We would simply suggest that the practice of vulgar 
young boys in the gallery of shying peanuts and paper pellets at the tigers, and 
saying " Hi-yi!" and manifesting approbation or dissatisfaction by such observations 
as "Bully for the lion!" "Go it, Gladdy!" "Boots!" "Speech!" "Take a 
walk round the block!" and so on, are extremely reprehensible, when the Emperor 
is present, and ought to be stopped by the police. Several times last night, when 
the supernumeraries entered the arena to drag out the bodies, the young ruffians in 
the gallery shouted, "Supe! supe!" and also, "Oh, what a coat!" and "Why don't 
you pad them shanks?" and made use of various other remarks expressive of deri- 
sion. These things are very annoying to the audience. 

" A matinee for the little folks is promised for this afternoon, on which occasion 
several martyrs will be eaten by the tigers. The regular performance will continue 
every night till further notice. Material change of programme every evening. 
Benefit of Valerian, Tuesday, 29th, if he lives." 



I have been a dramatic critic myself, in my time, and I was 
©ften surprised to notice how much more I knew about Hamlet 
than Forrest did ; and it gratifies me to observe, now, how 
much better my brethren of ancient times knew how a broad 
sword battle ought to be fought than the gladiators. 



OHAPTEE XXVII. 

SO far, good. If any man has a right to feel proud of him- 
self, and satisfied, surely it is I. For I have written 
about the Coliseum, and the gladiators, the martyrs, and the 
lions, and yet have never once used the phrase " butchered to 
make a Roman holyday." I am the only free white man of 
mature age, who has accomplished this since Byron originated 
the expression. 

Butchered to make a Roman holyday sounds well for the 
first seventeen or eighteen hundred thousand times one sees it 
in print, but after that it begins to grow tiresome. I find it 
in all the books concerning Rome — and here latterly it re- 
minds me of Judge Oliver. Oliver was a young lawyer, fresh 
from the schools, who had gone out to the deserts of Nevada 
to begin life. He found that country, and our ways of life, 
there, in those early days, different from life in New England 
or Paris. But he put on a woollen shirt and strapped a navy 
revolver to his person, took to the bacon and beans of the 
country, and determined to do in Nevada as Nevada did. 
Oliver accepted the situation so completely that although he 
must have sorrowed over many of his trials, he never com- 
plained — that is, he never complained but once. He, two others, 
and myself, started to the new silver mines in the Humboldt 
mountains — he to be Probate Judge of Humboldt county, and 
we to mine. The distance was two hundred miles. It was 
dead of winter. We bought a two-horse wagon and put 
eighteen hundred pounds of bacon, flour, beans, blasting- 
powder, picks and shovels in it ; we bought two sorry-looking 



THE UNCOMPLAINING MAN. 285 

Mexican " plugs," with the hair turned the wrong way and 
more corners on their bodies than there are on the mosque of 
Omar ; we hitched up and started. It was a dreadful trip. 
But Oliver did not complain. The horses dragged the wagon 
two miles from town and then gave out. Then we three 
pushed the wagon seven miles, and Oliver moved ahead and 
pulled the horses after him by the bits. We complained, but 




DID NOT COMPLAIN. 



Oliver did not. The ground was frozen, and it froze our 
backs while we slept ; the wind swept across our faces and 
froze our noses. Oliver did not complain. Five days of 
pushing the wagon by day and freezing by night brought us 
to the bad part of the journey — the Forty Mile Desert, or the 
Great American Desert, if you please. Still, this mildest- 
mannered man that ever was, had not complained. We 
started across at eight in the morning, pushing through sand 
that had no bottom ; toiling all day long by the wrecks of a 
thousand wagons, the skeletons of ten thousand oxen; by 
wagon-tires enough to hoop the Washington Monument to the 
top, and ox-chains enough to girdle Long Island ; by human 
graves; with our throats parched always, with thirst; lips 
bleeding from the alkali dust ; hungry, perspiring, and very, 
very weary — so weary that when we dropped in the sand 
every fifty yards to rest the horses, we could hardly keep from 
going to sleep — no complaints from Oliver: none the next 
morning at three o'clock, when we got across, tired to death. 



286 



THE UNCOMPLAINING MAN 



Awakened two or three nights afterward at midnight, in a narrow 
canon, by the snow falling on our faces, and appalled at the 
imminent danger of being "snowed in," we harnessed up and 
pushed on till eight in the morning, passed the " Divide " and 
knew we were saved. No complaints. Fifteen days of hard- 
ship and fatigue brought us to the end of the two hundred 
miles, and the Judge had not complained. We wondered if 
any thing could exasperate him. We built a Humboldt house. 
It is done in this way. You dig a square in the steep base of 
the mountain, and set up two uprights and top them with two 
joists. Then you stretch a great sheet of " cotton domestic " 
from the point where the joists join the hill-side down over 
the joists to the ground ; this makes the roof and the front of 

the mansion ; the sides 
and back are the dirt 
walls your digging has 
left. A chimney is easily 
made by turning up one 
corner of the roof. Oli- 
ver was sitting alone in 
this dismal den, one 
night, by a sage-brush 
fire, writing poetry; he 
was very fond of digging 
poetry out of himself — or 
blasting it out when it 
came hard. He heard an 
animal's footsteps close 
to the roof; a stone or 
two and some dirt came 
through and fell by him. 
He grew uneasy and said 
"Hi! — clear out from 
there, can't you !" — from 
time to time. But by and by he fell asleep where he sat, 
and pretty soon a mule fell down the chimney ! The fire flew 
in every direction, and Oliver went over backwards. About 




HUMBOLDT HOUSE. 



THE UNCOMPLAINING MAN. 287 

ten nights after that, he recovered confidence enough to go to 
writing poetry again. Again he dozed off to sleep, and again 
a mule fell down the chimney. This time, about half of that 
side of the house came in with the mule. Struggling to get 
up, the mule kicked the candle out and smashed most of the 
kitchen furniture, and raised considerable dust. These violent 
awakenings must have been annoying to Oliver, but he never 
complained. He moved to a mansion on the opposite side of 
the canon, because he had noticed the mules did not go there. 
One night about eight o'clock he was endeavoring to finish 
his poem, when a stone rolled in — then a hoof appeared below 
the canvas — then part of a cow — the after part. He leaned 
back in dread, and shouted " Hooy ! hooy ! get out of this !" 
and the cow struggled manfully — lost ground steadily — dirt 
and dust streamed down, and before Oliver could get well 
away, the entire cow crashed through on to the table and 
made a shapeless wreck of every thing ! 

Then, for the first time in his life, I think, Oliver com- 
plained. He said, 

" This thing is groiving monotonous /" 

Then he resigned his judgeship and left Humboldt county. 
"Butchered to make a Roman holyday" has grown monot- 
onous to me. 

In this connection I wish to say one word about Michael 
Angelo Buonarotti. I used to worship the mighty genius of 
Michael Angelo — that man who was great in poetry, painting, 
sculpture, architecture — great in every thing he undertook. 
But I do not want Michael Angelo for breakfast — for luncheon 
— for dinner — for tea — for supper — for between meals. I like a 
change, occasionally. In Genoa, he designed every thing ; in 
Milan he or his pupils designed every thing ; he designed the 
Lake of Como ; in Padua, Yerona, Yenice, Bologna, who did 
we ever hear of, from guides, but Michael Angelo ? In Flor- 
ence, he painted every thing, designed every thing, nearly, and 
what he did not design he used to sit on a favorite stone and 
look at, and they showed us the stone. In Pisa he designed 
every thing but the old shot-tower, and they would have at- 



288 



AX EXASPERATING SUBJECT. 



tributed that to him if it had not been so awfully out of the 
perpendicular. He designed the piers of Leghorn and the 
custom house regulations of Civita Yecchia. But, here — here 
it is frightful. He designed St. Peter's; he designed the 
Pope ; he designed the Pantheon, the uniform of the Pope's 
soldiers, the Tiber, the Yatican, the Coliseum, the Capitol, the 
Tarpeian Pock, the Barberini Palace, St. John Lateran, the 
Campagna, the Appian Way, the Seven Hills, the Baths of 
Caracalla, the Claudian Aqueduct, the Cloaca Maxima — the 
eternal bore designed the Eternal City, and unless all men 
and books do lie, he painted every thing in it ! Dan said the 
other day to the guide, " Enough, enough, enough ! Say no 

more ! Lump the 
whole thing ! say that 
the Creator made 
Italy from designs by 
Michael Angelo I" 

I never felt so fer- 
vently thankful, so 
soothed, so tranquil, 
so filled with a blessed 
peace, as I did yester- 
day when I learned 
that Michael Angelo 
was dead. 

But we have taken 
it out of this guide. 
He has marched us 
through miles of pic- 
tures and sculpture 
in the vast corridors of the Yatican ; and through miles of 
pictures and sculpture in twenty other palaces ; he has shown 
us the great picture in the Sistine Chapel, and frescoes enough 
to frescoe the heavens — pretty much all done by Michael 
Angelo. So with him we have played that game which has 
vanquished so many guides for us — imbecility and idiotic 
questions. These creatures never suspect — they have no idea 
of a sarcasm. 




DAN. 



THE ROMAN GUIDE, 



289 




BRONZE STATUE. 



He shows us a figure and says : " Statoo brunzo." (Bronze 
statue.) 

We look at it indifferently and the doctor asks : " By Mi- 
chael Angelo ?" 

"No — not know 
who." 

Then he shows us 
the ancient Roman 
Forum. The doc- 
tor asks : " Michael 
Angelo !" 

A stare from the 
guide. "No — thou- 
san' year before he 
is born." 

Then an Egyp- 
tian obelisk. A- 
gain : " Michael 
Angelo?" 

" Oh, mon dieu, 
genteelmen ! Zis is two thousan' year before he is born !" 

He grows so tired of that unceasing question sometimes, 
that he dreads to show us any thing at all. The wretch has 
tried all the ways he can think of to make us comprehend 
that Michael Angelo is only responsible for the creation of a 
part of the world, but somehow he has not succeeded yet. 
Relief for overtasked eyes and brain from study and sight- 
seeing is necessary, or we shall become idiotic sure enough. 
Therefore this guide must continue to suffer. If he does not 
enjoy it, so much the worse for him. We do. 

In this place I may as well jot down a chapter concerning 
those necessary nuisances, European guides. Many a man 
has wished in his heart he could do without his guide ; but 
knowing he could not, has wished he could get some amuse- 
ment out of him as a remuneration for the affliction of his 
society. We accomplished this latter matter, and if our 
experience can be made useful to others they are welcome to it 

19 



290 ASININE GUIDES IN GENERAL. 

Guides know about enough English to tangle every thing 
up so that a man can make neither head or tail of it. They 
know their story by heart — the history of every statue, paint- 
ing, cathedral or other wonder they show you. They know it 
and tell it as a parrot would — and if you interrupt, and throw 
them off the track, they have to go back and begin over again. 
All their lives long, they are employed in showing strange 
things to foreigners and listening to their bursts of admiration. 
It is human nature to take delight in exciting admiration. It 
is what prompts children to say " smart" things, and do ab- 
surd ones, and in other ways "show off" when company is 
present. It is what makes gossips turn out in rain and storm 
to go and be the first to tell a startling bit of news. Think, 
then, what a passion it becomes with a guide, whose privilege 
it is, every day, to show to strangers wonders that throw them 
into perfect ecstasies of admiration ! He gets so that he could 
not by any possibility live in a soberer atmosphere. After we 
discovered this, we never went into ecstacies any / more — we 
never admired any thing — we never showed any but impassi- 
ble faces and stupid indifference in the presence of the sub- 
limest wonders a guide had to display. We had found their 
weak point. We have made good use of it ever since. We 
have made some of those people savage, at times, but we have 
never lost our own serenity. 

The doctor asks the questions, generally, because he can 
keep his countenance, and look more like an inspired idiot, 
and throw more imbecility into the tone of his voice than any 
man that lives. It comes natural to him. 

The guides in Genoa are delighted to secure an American 
party, because Americans so much wonder, and deal so much 
in sentiment and emotion before any relic of Columbus. Our 
guide there fidgeted about as if he had swallowed a spring 
mattrass. He was full of animation — full of impatience. He 
said: 

" Come wis me, genteelmen ! — come ! I show you ze letter 
writing by Christopher Colombo! — write it himself! — write it 
wis his own hand ! — come !" 



REMARKABLE PENMANSHIP. 



291 



He took us to the municipal palace. After much impres- 
sive rumbling of keys and opening of locks, the stained and 
aged document was spread before us. The guide's eyes 
sparkled. He danced about us and tapped the parchment 
with his finger : 

" What I tell you, genteelmen ! Is it not so ? See ! hand- 
writing Christopher Colombo ! — write it himself !" 

We looked indifferent — unconcerned. The doctor examined 
the document very deliberately, during a painful pause. — Then 
he said, without any show of interest : 

" Ah — Ferguson — what — what did you say was the name 
of the party who wrote this ?" 

?f Christopher Colombo ! ze great Christopher Colombo !" 

Another deliberate examination. 

" Ah — did he write it himself, or — or how ?" 




PENMANSHIP. 



"He write it himself! — Christopher Colombo! he's own 

hand- writing, write by himself !" 

Then the doctor laid the document down and said : 

" Why, I have seen boys in America only fourteen years 

old that could write better than that." 



292 IMPOTENT QUESTIONS. 

" But zis is ze great Christo — " 

" I don't care who it is ! It's the worst writing I ever saw. 
Now you musn't think you can impose on us because we are 
strangers. We are not fools, by a good deal. If you have 
got any specimens of penmanship of real merit, trot them out ! 
— and if you haven't, drive on !" 

We drove on. The guide was considerably shaken up, but 
he made one more venture. He had something which he 
thought would overcome us. He said : 

" Ah, genteelmen, you come wis me ! I show you beautiful, 
O, magnificent bust Christopher Colombo ! — splendid, grand, 
magnificent !" 

He brought us before the beautiful bust — for it was beauti- 
ful — and sprang back and struck an attitude : 

" Ah, look, genteelmen ! — beautiful, grand, — bust Christo- 
pher Colombo ! — beautiful bust, beautiful pedestal !" 

The doctor put up his eye-glass — procured for such occa- 
-sions: 

" Ah — what did you say this gentleman's name was ?" 

" Christopher Colombo ! — ze great Christopher Colombo !" 

" Christopher Colombo — the great Christopher Colombo. 
Well, what did Ae do?" 

" Discover America ! — discover America, Oh, ze devil !" 

" Discover America. No — that statement will hardly wash. 
We are just from America ourselves. We heard nothing 
about it. Christopher Colombo — pleasant name — is — is he 
dead ?" 

" Oh, corpo di Baccho ! — three hundred year !" 

"What did he die of?" 

** I do not know ! — I can not tell." 

« Small-pox, think?" 

" I do not know, genteelmen ! — I do not know what he die 
of!" 

"Measles, likely?" 

" May be — may be — I do not know — I think he die of some- 
things." 

" Parents living ?" 



LABOR LOST. 295 

" Im-posseeble !" 

" Ah — which is the bust and which is the pedestal ?" 
" Santa Maria ! — zis ze bust ! — zis ze pedestal !" 
" Ah, I see, I see — happy combination — very happy combi- 
nation, indeed. Is — is this the first time this gentleman was 
ever on a bust ?" 




ON A BUST. 



That joke was lost on the foreigner — guides can not master 
the subtleties of the American joke. 

We have made it interesting for this Roman guide. Yester- 
day we spent three or four hours in the Yatican, again, that 
wonderful world of curiosities. We came very near express- 
ing interest, sometimes — even admiration — it was very hard 
to keep from it. We succeeded though. Nobody else ever 
did, in the Yatican museums. The guide was bewildered — 
non-plussed. He walked his legs off, nearly, hunting up ex- 
traordinary things, and exhausted all his ingenuity on us, but 



A SURE THING. 

it was a failure ; we never showed any interest in any thing. 
He had reserved what he considered to be his greatest wonder 
till the last — a royal Egyptian mummy, the best preserved in 
the world, perhaps. He took us there. He felt so sure, this 
time, that some of his old enthusiasm came back to him : 

" See, genteelmen ! — Mummy ! Mummy !" 

The eye-glass came up as calmly, as deliberately as ever. 

" Ah, — Ferguson — what did I understand you to say the 
gentleman's name was ?" 

"Name? — he got no name! — Mummy! — 'Gyptian mum- 
my!" 

" Yes, yes. Born here ?" 

" No ! ' Gyptian mummy !" 

" Ah, just so. Frenchman, I presume ?" 

" No ! — not Frenchman, not Roman ! — born in Egypta !" 

" Born in Egypta. Never heard of Egypta before. For- 
eign locality, likely. Mummy — mummy. How calm he is — 
how self-possessed. Is, ah — is he dead V 9 

" Oh, sacre bleu, been dead three thousan' year !" 

The doctor turned on him savagely : 

" Here, now, what do you mean by such conduct as this ! 
Playing us for Chinamen because we are strangers and trying 
to learn ! Trying to impose your vile second-hand carcasses on 
us/ — thunder and lightning, I've a notion to — to — if you've 
got a nice fresh corpse, fetch him out ! — or by George we'll 
brain you !" 

We make it exceedingly interesting for this Frenchman. 
However, he has paid us back, partly, without knowing it. 
He came to the hotel this morning to ask if we were up, and 
he endeavored as well as he could to describe us, so that the 
landlord would know which persons he meant. He finished 
with the casual remark that we were lunatics. The observa- 
tion was so innocent and so honest that it amounted to a very 
good thing for a guide to say. 

There is one remark (already mentioned,) which never yet 
has failed to disgust these guides. We use it always, when 
we can think of nothing else to say. After they have ex- 



SUBTERRANEAN MYSTERIES. 295 

hausted their enthusiasm pointing out to us and praising the 
beauties of some ancient bronze image or broken-legged 
statue, we look at it stupidly and in silence for five, ten, 
fifteen minutes — as long as we can hold out, in fact — and then 
ask: 

« l s _i s he dead ?" 

That conquers the serenest of them. It is not what they 
are looking for — especially a new guide. Our Roman Fergu- 
son is the most patient, unsuspecting, long-suffering subject 
we have had yet. We shall be sorry to part with him. We 
have enjoyed his society very much. We trust he has enjoyed 
ours, but we are harassed with doubts. 

We have been in the catacombs. It was like going down 
into a very deep cellar, only it was a cellar which had no end 
to it. The narrow passages are roughly hewn in the rock, 
and on each hand as you pass along, the hollowed shelves are 
carved out, from three to fourteen deep ; each held a corpse 
once. There are names, and Christian symbols, and prayers, 
or sentences expressive of Christian hopes, carved upon nearly 
every sarcophagus. The dates belong away back in the dawn 
of the Christian era, of course. Here, in these holes in the 
ground, the first Christians sometimes burrowed to escape per- 
secution. They crawled out at night to get food, but remained 
under cover in the day time. The priest told us that St. 
Sebastian lived under ground for some time while he was 
being hunted ; he went out one day, and the soldiery discov- 
ered and shot him to death with arrows. Five or six of the 
early Popes — those who reigned about sixteen hundred years 
ago — held their papal courts and advised with their clergy in 
the bowels of the earth. Dming seventeen years — from A. D. 
235 to A. D. 252 — the Popes did not appear above ground. 
Four were raised to the great office during that period. Four 
years apiece, or thereabouts. It is very suggestive of the un- 
healthiness of underground graveyards as places of residence. 
One Pope afterward spent his entire pontificate in the cata- 
combs — eight years. Another was discovered in them and 
murdered in the episcopal chair. There was no satisfaction 



296 RELIGIOUS EXPLOSION. 

in being a Pope in those days. There were too many annoy- 
ances. There are one hundred and sixty catacombs under 
Home, each with its maze of narrow passages crossing and re- 
crossing each other and each passage walled to the top with 
scooped graves its entire length. A careful estimate makes the 
length of the passages of all the catacombs combined foot up 
nine hundred miles, and their graves number seven millions. 
We did not go through all the passages of all the catacombs. 
We were very anxious to do it, and made the necessary ar- 
rangements, but our too limited time obliged us to give up the 
idea. So we only groped through the dismal labyrinth of 
St. Callixtus, under the Church of St. Sebastian. In the 
various catacombs are small chapels rudely hewn in the stones, 
and here the early Christians often held their religious services 
by dim, ghostly lights. Think of mass and a sermon away 
down in those tangled caverns under ground ! 

In the catacombs were buried St. Cecilia, St. Agnes, and 
several other of the most celebrated of the saints. In the 
catacomb of St. Callixtus, St. Bridget used to remain long 
hours in holy contemplation, and St. Charles Borrom6o was 
wont to spend whole nights in prayer there. It was also the 
scene of a very marvelous thing. 

" Here the heart of St. Philip Neri was so inflamed with divine love as to burst 
his ribs." 

I find that grave statement in a book published in New 
York in 1858, and written by " Rev. William H. Neligan, 
LL.D., M. A., Trinity College, Dublin ; Member of the Ar- 
chaeological Society of Great Britain." Therefore, I believe 
it. Otherwise, I could not. Under other circumstances I 
should have felt a curiosity to know what Philip had for din- 
ner. 

This author puts my credulity on its mettle every now and 
then. He tells of one St. Joseph Calasanctius whose house in 
Rome he visited ; he visited only the house — the priest has 
been dead two hundred years. He says the Virgin Mary ap- 
peared to this saint. Then he continues : 



THE LEGEND OF ARA CCELI. 297 

" His tongue and his heart, which were found after nearly a century to be whole, 
when the body was disinterred before his canonization, are still preserved in a 
glass case, and after two centuries the heart is still whole. When the French 
troops came to Rome, and when Pius VII. was carried away prisoner, blood 
dropped from it." 

To read that in a book written by a monk far back in the 
Middle Ages, would surprise no one ; it would sound natural 
and proper ; but when it is seriously stated in the middle of 
the nineteenth century, by a man of finished education, an 
LL.D., M. A., and an Archaeological magnate, it sounds 
strangely enough. Still, I would gladly change my unbelief 
for Neligan's faith, and let him make the conditions as hard as 
he pleased. 

The old gentleman's undoubting, unquestioning simplicity 
has a rare freshness about it in these matter-of-fact railroading 
and telegraphing days. Hear him, concerning the church of 
Ara Cceli : 

"In the roof of the church, directly above the high altar, is engraved, 'Regina 
Cceli laetare Alleluia." In the sixth century Rome was visited by a fearful pesti- 
lence. Gregory the Great urged the people to do penance, and a general proces- 
sion was formed. It was to proceed from Ara Coeli to St. Peter's. As it passed 
before the mole of Adrian, now the Castle of St. Angelo, the sound of heavenly 
voices was heard singing (it was Easter morn.) ' Regina Cceli, laetare ! alleluia ! 
quia quern meruisti portare, alleluia ! resurrexit sicut dixit ; alleluia V The Pontiff, 
carrying in his hands the portrait of the Virgin, (which is over the high altar and 
is said to hay« been painted by St. Luke,) answered, with the astonished people, 
4 Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia V At the same time an angel was seen to put up a 
sword in a scabbard, and the pestilence ceased on the same day. There are four 
circumstances which confirm* this miracle: the annual procession which take* 
place in the western church on the feast of St. Mark; the statue of St. Michael, 
placed on the mole of Adrian, which has since that time beep called the Castle of 
St Angelo ; the antiphon Regina Coeli which the C*#inlv» church sings during 
paschal time ; and the inscription in the church." 

* The italics art »in»-— M. T. 



OHAPTEE XXVIII. 

FKOM the sanguinary sports of the Holy Inquisition ; the 
slaughter of the Coliseum ; and the dismal tombs of the 
Catacombs, I naturally pass to the picturesque horrors of the 
Capuchin Convent. We stopped a moment in a small chapel 
in the church to admire a picture of St. Michael vanquishing 
Satan — a picture which is so beautiful that I can not but think 
it belongs to the reviled " Renaissance" notwithstanding I be- 
lieve they told us one of the ancient old masters painted it — 
and then we descended into the vast vault underneath. 

Here was a spectacle for sensitive nerves ! Evidently the 
old masters had been at work in this place. There were six 
divisions in the apartment, and each division was ornamented 
with a style of decoration peculiar to itself — and these decora- 
tions were in every instance formed of human bones ! There 
were shapely arches, built wholly of thigh bones ; there were 
startling pyramids, built wholly of grinning skulls ; there 
were quaint architectural structures of various kinds, built of 
shin bones and the bones of the arm ; on the wall were elabo- 
rate frescoes, whose curving vines were made of knotted human 
vertebrae; whose delicate tendrils were made of sinews and 
tendons ; whose flowers were formed of knee-caps and toe-nails. 
Every lasting portion of the human frame was represented in 
these intricate designs (they were by Michael Angelo, I think,) 
and there was a careful finish about the work, and an attention 
to details that betrayed the artist's love of his labors as well as 
his schooled ability. I asked the good-natured monk who ac- 
companied us, who did this ? And he said, " We did it " — ■ 
meaning himself and his brethren up stairs. I could see that 



LEGEND OF BROTHER THOMAS. 



299 



the old friar took a high pride in his curious show. We made 
him talkative by exhibiting an interest we never betrayed to 
guides. 

" "Who were these people ?" 

" We — up stairs — Monks of the Capuchin order — my breth- 
ren." 




VAULTS OF THE CONVENT. 



"How many departed monks were required to upholster 
these six parlors ?" 

" These are the bones of four thousand." 
" It took a long time to get enough ?" 
" Many, many centuries." 



300 LEGEND OF BROTHER THOMAS. 

"Their different parts are well separated — skulls in one 
room, legs in another, ribs in another — there would be stirring 
times here for a while if the last trump should blow. Some 
of the brethren might get hold of the wrong leg, in the confu- 
sion, and the wrong skull, and find themselves limping, and 
looking through eyes that were wider apart or closer together 
than they were used to. You can not tell any of these parties 
apart, I suppose ?" 

" Oh, yes, I know many of them." 

He put his finger on a skull. " This was Brother Anselmo — 
dead three hundred years — a good man." 

He touched another. " This was Brother Alexander — dead 
two hundred and eighty years. This was Brother Carlo — dead 
about as long." 

Then he took a skull and held it in his hand, and looked re- 
flectively upon it, after the manner of the grave-digger when 
he discourses of Yorick. 

"This," he said, " was Brother Thomas. He was a young 
prince, the scion of a proud house that traced its lineage back 
to the grand old days of Borne well nigh two thousand years 
ago. He loved beneath his estate. His family persecuted him ; 
persecuted the girl, as well. They drove her from Rome ; he 
followed ; he sought her far and wide ; he found no trace of 
her. He came back and offered his broken heart at our altar 
and his weary life to the service of God. But look you. 
Shortly his father died, and likewise his mother. The girl re- 
turned, rejoicing. She sought every where for him whose eyes 
had used to look tenderly into hers out of this poor skull, but 
ghe could not find him. At last, in this coarse garb we wear, 
she recognized him in the street. He knew her. It was too 
late. He fell where he stood. They took him up and brought 
him here. He never spoke afterward. Within the week he 
died. You can see the color of his hair — faded, somewhat — 
by this thin shred that clings still to the temple. " This," 
[taking up a thigh bone,] " was his. The veins of this leaf in 
the decorations over your head, were his finger-joints, a hun- 
dred and fifty years ago." 



A FESTIVE COMPANY OF THE DEAD. $01 

This business-like way of illustrating a touching story of the 
heart by laying the several fragments of the lover before us 
and naming them, was as grotesque a performance, and as 
ghastly, as any I ever witnessed. I hardly knew whether to 
smile or shudder. There are nerves and muscles in our frames 
whose functions and whose methods of working it seems a sort 
of sacrilege to describe by cold physiological names and surgi- 
cal technicalities, and the monk's talk suggested to me some- 
thing of this kind. Fancy a surgeon, with his nippers lifting 
tendons, muscles and such things into view, out of the complex 
machinery of a corpse, and observing, " Now this little nerve 
quivers — the vibration is imparted to this muscle — from here it 
is passed to this fibrous substance ; here its ingredients are sep- 
arated by the chemical action of the blood — one part goes to 
the heart and thrills it with what is popularly termed emotion, 
another part follows this nerve to the brain and communicates 
intelligence of a startling character — the third part glides along 
this passage and touches the spring connected with the fluid 
receptacles that lie in the rear of the eye. Thus, by this sim- 
ple and beautiful process, the party is informed that his mother 
is dead, and he weeps." Horrible ! 

I asked the monk if all the brethren up stairs expected to be 
put in this place when they died. He answered quietly : 

" We must all lie here at last." 

See what one can accustom himself to. — The reflection that 
he must some day be taken apart like an engine or a clock, or 
like a house whose owner is gone, and worked up into arches 
and pyramids and hideous frescoes, did not distress this monk 
in the least. I thought he even looked as if he were thinking, 
with complacent vanity, that his own skull would look well on 
top of the heap and his own ribs add a charm to the frescoes 
which possibly they lacked at present. 

Here and there, in ornamental alcoves, stretched upon beds 
of bones, lay dead and dried-up monks, with lank frames 
dressed in the black robes one sees ordinarily upon priests. 
We examined one closely. The skinny hands were clasped 
upon the breast ; two lustreless tufts of hair stuck to the skull ; 



302 



THE GREAT VATICAN MUSEUM. 



the skin was brown and sunken ; it stretched tightly over the 
cheek bones and made them stand out sharply; the crisp 
dead eyes were deep in the sockets ; the nostrils were painfully 

prominent, the 
end of the nose 
being gone ; 
"he lips had 
shriveled away 
from the yel- 
low teeth: and 
brought down 
to us through 
the circling 
years, and pet- 
rified there, 
was a weird 
laugh a full 
century old ! 

It was the 
j oiliest laugh, 
but yet the 
most dreadful, that one can imagine. Surely, I thought, it 
must have been a most extraordinary joke this veteran pro- 
duced with his latest breath, that he has not got done laughing 
at it yet. At this moment I saw that the old instinct was 
strong upon the boys, and I said we had better hurry to St. 
Peter's. They were trying to keep from asking, " Is — is he 
/lead ?" 

It makes me dizzy, to think of the Yatican — of its wilder- 
ness of statues, paintings, and curiosities of every description 
and every age. The " old masters " (especially in sculpture,) 
fairly swarm, there. I can not write about the Yatican. I 
think I shall never remember any thing I saw there distinctly 
but the mummies, and the Transfiguration, by Raphael, and 
some other things it is not necessary to mention now. I shall 
remember the Transfiguration partly because it was placed ha 
a room almost by itself; partly because it is acknowledged by 




DRIED CONVENT FRUIT. 



THE GREAT VATICAN MUSEUM. 



303 



all to be the first oil painting in the world ; and partly because 
it was wonderfully beautiful. The colors are fresh and rich, 
the " expression," I am told, is fine, the " feeling " is lively, the 
" tone " is good, the " depth " is profound, and the width is 
about four and a half feet, I should judge. It is a picture that 
really holds one's attention ; its beauty is fascinating. It is 
fine enough to be a Renaissance. A remark I made a while 
ago suggests a thought — and a hope. Is it not possible that 
the reason I find such charms in this picture is because it is out 
of the crazy chaos of the galleries ? If some of the others 
were set apart, might not they be beautiful ? If this were set 
in the midst of the tempest of pictures one finds in the vast 
galleries of the Roman palaces, would I think it so handsome ? 
If, up to this time, I had seen only one " old master " in each 
palace, instead of acres and acres of walls and ceilings fairly 
papered with them, might I not have a more civilized opinion 
of the old masters than I have now ? I think so. When I 
was a school-boy and was to have a new knife, I could not make 
up my mind as to which was the 
prettiest in the show-case, and I 
did not think any of them were 
particularly pretty; and so I 
chose with a heavy heart. But 
when I looked at my purchase, 
at home, where no glittering 
blades came into competition 
with it, I was astonished to see 
how handsome it was. To this 
day my new hats look better out 
of the shop than they did in it 
with other new hats. It begins 
to dawn upon me, now, that pos- 
sibly, what I have been taking 
for uniform ugliness in the gal- 
leries may be uniform beauty af- 
ter all. I honestly hope it is, to others, but certainly it is not 
to me. Perhaps the reason I used to enjoy going to the Academy 




AT THE STORE. 



304 



ARTIST SINS OF OMISSION, 




of Fine Arts in New York was because there were but a few 
hundred paintings in it, and it did not surfeit me to go through 

the list. I suppose the Academy 
was bacon and beans in the 
Forty-Mile Desert, and a Euro- 
pean gallery is a state dinner of 
thirteen courses. One leaves no 
sign after him of the one dish, 
but the thirteen frighten away 
his appetite and give him no 
satisfaction. 

There is one thing I am cer- 
tain of, though. "With all the 
Michael Angelos, the Raphaels, 
the Guidos and the other old 
masters, the sublime history of 
Rome remains unpainted ! They 
at home. painted Yirgins enough, and 

popes enough and saintly scare- 
crows enough, to people Paradise, almost, and these things are 
all they did paint. " Nero fiddling o'er burning Rome," the 
assassination of Caesar, the stirring spectacle of a hundred 
thousand people bending forward with rapt interest, in the 
Coliseum, to see two skillful gladiators hacking away each oth- 
ers' lives, a tiger springing upon a kneeling martyr — these and 
a thousand other matters which we read of with a living inter- 
est, must be sought for only in books — not among the rubbish 
left by the old masters — who are no more, I have the satisfac- 
tion of informing the public. 

They did paint, and they did carve in marble, one historical 
scene, and one only, (of any great historical consequence.) 
And what was it and why did they choose it, particularly ? It 
was the Rape of the Sabines, and they chose it for the legs and 
busts. 

I like to look at statues, however, and I like to look at pic- 
tures, also — even of monks looking up in sacred ecstacy, and 
monks looking down in meditation, and monks skirmishing for 



PAPAL PROTECTION OF ART- 305 

something to eat — and therefore I drop ill nature to thank the 
papal government for so jealously guarding and so industri- 
ously gathering up these things; and for permitting me, a 
stranger and not an entirely friendly one, to roam at will and 
unmolested among them, charging me nothing, and only re- 
quiring that I shall behave myself simply as well as I ought to 
behave in any other man's house. I thank the Holy Father 
right heartily, and I wish him long life and plenty of happiness. 

The Popes have long been the patrons and preservers of 
art, just as our new, practical Kepublic is the encourager and 
upholder of mechanics. In their Vatican is stored up all that 
is curious and beautiful in art ; in our Patent Office is hoarded 
all that is curious or useful in mechanics. When a man in- 
vents a new style of horse-collar or discovers a new and supe- 
rior method of telegraphing, our government issues a patent 
to him that is worth a fortune ; when a man digs up an ancient 
statue in the Campagna, the Pope gives him a fortune in gold 
coin. We can make something of a guess at a man's character 
by the style of nose he carries on his face. The Vatican and 
the Patent Office are governmental noses, and they bear a deal 
of character about them. 

The guide showed us a colossal statue of Jupiter, in the 
Vatican, which he said looked so damaged and rusty — so like 
the God of the Vagabonds — because it had but recently been 
dug up in the Campagna. He asked how much we supposed 
this Jupiter was worth ? I replied, with intelligent promptness, 
that he was probably worth about four dollars — may be four 
and a half. " A hundred thousand dollars !" Ferguson said. 
Ferguson said, further, that the Pope permits no ancient work 
of this kind to leave his dominions. He appoints a commis- 
sion to examine discoveries like this and report upon the value ; 
then the Pope pays the discoverer one-half of that assessed 
value and takes the statue. He said this Jupiter was dug from 
a field which had just been bought for thirty-six thousand dol- 
lars, so the first crop was a good one for the new farmer. I do 
not know whether Ferguson always tells the truth or not, but 
I suppose he does. I know that an exorbitant export duty is 

v 20 



306 IMPROVED SCRIPTURE. 

exacted upon all pictures painted by the old masters, in order 
to discourage the sale of those in the private collections. I am 
satisfied, also, that genuine old masters hardly exist at all, in 
America, because the cheapest and most insignificant of them 
are valued at the price of a fine farm. I proposed to buy a 
small trifle of a Raphael, myself, but the price of it was eighty 
thousand dollars, the export duty would have made it consid- 
erably over a hundred, and so I studied on it awhile and con- 
cluded not to take it. 

I wish here to mention an inscription I have seen, before I 
forget it : 

" Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth to men of 
good will !" It is not good scripture, but it is sound Catholic 
and human nature. 

This is in letters of gold around the apsis of a mosaic group 
at the side of the scala santa, church of St. John Lateran, the 
Mother and Mistress of all the Catholic churches of the world. 
The group represents the Saviour, St. Peter, Pope Leo, St. Sil- 
vester, Constantine and Charlemagne. Peter is giving the 
pallium to the Pope, and a standard to Charlemagne. The 
Saviour is giving the keys to St. Silvester, and a standard to 
Constantine. No prayer is offered to the Saviour, who seems 
to be of little importance any where in Rome ; but an inscrip- 
tion below says, " Blessed Peter, give life to Pope Leo and victory 
to King Charles." It does not say, " Intercede for us, through 
the Saviour, with the Father, for this boon," but " Blessed Pe- 
ter, give it us." 

In all seriousness — without meaning to be frivolous — without 
meaning to be irreverent, and more than all, without meaning 
to be blasphemous, — I state as my simple deduction from the 
things I have seen and the things I have heard, that the Holy 
Personages rank thus in Pome : 

First — " The Mother of God " — otherwise the Virgin Mary. 

Second — The Deity. 

Third— Peter. 

Fourth — Some twelve or fifteen canonized Popes and martyrs. 

Fifth — Jesus Christ the Savic ur — (but always as an infant in 
arms.) 



SCALE OF SACRED HONORS. 307 

I may be wrong in this— my judgment errs often, just as is 
the case with other men's — but it is my judgment, be it good 
or bad. 

Just here I will mention something that seems curious to 
me. There are no " Christ's Churches " in Pome, and no 
" Churches of the Holy Ghost," that I can discover. There 
are some four hundred churches, but about a fourth of them 
seem to be named for the Madonna and St. Peter. There are 
so many named for Mary that they have to be distinguished by 
all sorts of affixes, if I understand the matter rightly. Then 
we have churches of St. Louis ; St. Augustine ; St. Agnes ; St. 
Calixtus ; St. Lorenzo in Lucina ; St. Lorenzo in Damaso ; St. 
Cecilia; St. Athanasius; St. Philip Neri; St. Catherine, St. 
Dominico, and a multitude of lesser saints whose names are 
not familiar in the world — and away down, clear out of the 
list of the churches, comes a couple of hospitals : one of them is 
named for the Saviour and the other for the Holy Ghost ! 

Day after day and night after night we have wandered 
among the crumbling wonders of Pome ; day after day and 
night after night we have fed upon the dust and decay of five- 
and-twenty centuries — have brooded over them by day and 
dreampt of them by night till sometimes we seemed molder- 
ing away ourselves, and growing defaced and cornerless, and 
liable at any moment to fall a prey to some antiquary and be 
patched in the legs, and " restored " with an unseemly nose, 
and labeled wrong and dated wrong, and set up in the Vatican 
for poets to drivel about and vandals to scribble their names 
on forever and forevermore. 

But the surest way to stop writing about Pome is to stop. 
I wished to write a real " guide-book " chapter on this fascina- 
ting city, but I could not do it, because I have felt all the time 
like a boy in a candy-shop — there was every thing to choose 
from, and yet no choice. I have drifted along hopelessly for a 
hundred pages of manuscript without knowing where to com- 
mence. I will not commence at all. Our passports have been 
examined. We will go to Naples. 



CHAPTER XXIX. 

THE ship is lying here in the harbor of Naples — quaran- 
tined. She has been here several days and will remain 
several more. We that came by rail from Home have escaped 
this misfortune. Of course no one is allowed to go on board 
the ship, or come ashore from her. She is a prison, now. The 
passengers probably spend the long, blazing days looking out 
from under the awnings at Vesuvius and the beautiful city — ■ 
and in swearing. Think of ten days of this sort of pastime ! — > 
We go out every day in a boat and request them to come 
ashore. It soothes them. We lie ten steps from the ship and 
tell them how splendid the city is ; and how much better the 
hotel fare is here than any where else in Europe ; and how 
cool it is ; and what frozen continents of ice cream there are ; 
and what a time we are having cavorting about the country 
and sailing to the islands in the Bay. This tranquilizes them. 



ASCENT OF VESUVIUS. 

I shall remember our trip to Vesuvius for many a day — > 
partly because of its sight-seeing experiences, but chiefly on 
account of the fatigue of the journey. Two or three of us 
had been resting ourselves among the tranquil and beautiful 
scenery of the island of Ischia, eighteen miles out in the har- 
bor, for two days ; we called it " resting," but I do not remem- 
ber now what the resting consisted of, for when we got back 
to Naples we had not slept for forty-eight hours. We were 
just about to go to bed early in the evening, and catcb up on 



ASCENT OF VESUVIUS. 



30& 



some of the sleep we had lost, when we heard of this Vesuvius 
expedition. There was to be eight of us in the party, and we 
were to leave Naples at midnight. We laid in some provis- 
ions for the trip, engaged carriages to take us to Annunciation, 
and then moved about 
the city, to keep awake, 
till twelve. We got away 
punctually, and in the 
course of an hour and a 
half arrived at the town 
of Annunciation. An- 
nunciation is the very 
last place under the sun. 
In other towns in Italy 
the people lie around qui- 
etly and wait for you to 
ask them a question or 
do some overt act that 
can be charged for — but 
in Annunciation they 
have lost even that frag- 
ment of delicacy; they 
seize a lady's shawl from 
a chair and hand it to 
her and charge a penny ; 
they open a carriage door, 

and charge for it — shut it when you get out, and charge for it ; 
they help you to take off a duster — two cents; brush your 
clothes and make them worse than they were before — two 
cents ; smile upon you — two cents ; bow, with a lick-spittle 
smirk, hat in hand — two cents ; they volunteer all information, 
such as that the mules will arrive presently — two cents — warm 
day, sir — two cents — take you four hours to make the ascent — 
two cents. And so $iey go. They crowd you — infest you — 
swarm about you, and sweat and smell offensively, and look 
sneaking and mean, and obsequious. There is no office too 
degrading for them to perform, for money. I have had no op- 




SOOTHING THE PILGRIMS. 



310 AN UNLOVELY COMMUNITY. 

portunity to find out any thing about the upper classes by my 
own observation, but from what I hear said about them I judge 
that what they lack in one or two of the bad traits the canaille 
have, they make up in one or two others that are worse. How 
the people beg! — many of them very well dressed, too. 

I said I knew nothing against the upper classes by personal 
observation. I must recall it ! I had forgotten. What I saw 
their bravest and their fairest do last night, the lowest multi- 
tude that could be scraped up out of the purlieus of Christen- 
dom would blush to do, I think. They assembled by hundreds, 
and even thousands, in the great Theatre of San Carlo, to do — 
what? Why, simply, to make fun of an old woman — to de- 
ride, to hiss, to jeer at an actress they once worshipped, but 
whose beauty is faded now and whose voice has lost its former 
richness. Every body spoke of the rare sport there was to be. 
They said the theatre would be crammed, because Frezzolini 
was going to sing. It was said she could not sing well, now, 
but then the people liked to see her, anyhow. And so we 
went. And every time the woman sang they hissed and 
laughed — the whole magnificent house — and as soon as she left 
the stage they called her on again with applause. Once or 
twice she was encored Hye and six times in succession, and re- 
ceived with hisses when she appeared, and discharged with 
hisses and laughter when she had finished — then instantly en- 
cored and insulted again ! And how the high-born knaves 
enjoyed it ! White-kidded gentlemen and ladies laughed till 
the tears came, and clapped their hands in very ecstacy when 
that unhappy old woman would come meekly out for the sixth 
time, with uncomplaining patience, to meet a storm of hisses ! 
It was the crudest exhibition — the most wanton, the most un- 
feeling. The singer would have conquered an audience of 
American rowdies by her brave, unflinching tranquillity (for 
she answered encore after encore, and smiled and bowed pleas- 
antly, and sang the best she possibly could, and went bowing 
off, through all the jeers and hisses, without ever losing coun- 
tenance or temper :) and surely in any other land than Italy 
her sex and her helplessness must have been an ample protec- 



MONKISH MIRACLES. 311 

tion to her — she could have needed no other. Think what a 
multitude of small souls were crowded into that theatre last 
night. If the manager could have filled his theatre with Nea- 
politan souls alone, without the bodies, he could not have 
cleared less than ninety millions of dollars. What traits of 
character must a man have to enable him to help three thou- 
sand miscreants to hiss, and jeer, and laugh at one friendless 
old woman, and shamefully humiliate her ? He must have all 
the vile, mean traits there are. My observation persuades me 
(I do not like to venture beyond my own personal observation,) 
that the upper classes of Naples possess those traits of charac- 
ter. Otherwise they may be very good people ; I can not say. 

ASCENT OF VESUVIUS CONTINUED. 

In this city of Naples, they believe in and support one of the 
wretchedest of all the religious impostures one can find in 
Italy — the miraculous liquefaction of the blood of St. Janua- 
rius. Twice a year the priests assemble all the people at the 
Cathedral, and get out this vial of clotted blood and let them 
see it slowly dissolve and become liquid — and every day for 
eight days, this dismal farce is repeated, while the priests go 
among the crowd and collect money for the exhibition. The 
first day, the blood liquefies in forty-seven minutes — the church 
is crammed, then, and time must be allowed the collectors to 
get around : after that it liquefies a little quicker and a little 
quicker, every day, as the houses grow smaller, till on the 
eighth day, with only a few dozens present to see the miracle, 
it liquefies in four minutes. 

And here, also, they used to have a grand procession, of 
priests, citizens, soldiers, sailors, and the high dignitaries of the 
City Government, once a year, to shave the head of a made- 
up Madonna — a stuffed and painted image, like a milliner's 
dummy — whose hair miraculously grew and restored itself 
every twelve months. They still kept up this shaving proces- 
sion as late as four or iive years ago. It was a source of great 
profit to the church that possessed the remarkable effigy, and 



312 AN ITALIAN TRAIT. 

the ceremony of the public barbering of her was always car- 
ried out with the greatest possible eclat and display — the more 
the better, because the more excitement there was about it the 
larger the crowds it drew and the heavier the revenues it pro- 
duced — but at last a day came when the Pope and his servants 
were unpopular in Naples, and the City Government stopped 
the Madonna's annual show. 

There we have two specimens of these Neapolitans — two of 
the silliest possible frauds, which half the population religiously 
and faithfully believed, and the other half either believed also or 
else said nothing about, and thus lent themselves to the support 
of the imposture. I am very well satisfied to think the whole 
population believed in those poor, cheap miracles — a people 
who want two cents every time they bow to you, and who 
abuse a woman, are capable of it, I think. 

ASCENT OF VESUVIUS CONTINUED. 

These Neapolitans always ask four times as much money as 
they intend to take, but if you give them what they first de- 
mand, they feel ashamed of themselves for aiming so low, and 
immediately ask more. When money is to be paid and re- 
ceived, there is always some vehement jawing and gesticula- 
ting about it. One can not buy and pay for two cents' worth 
of clams without trouble and a quarrel. One " course," in a 
two-horse carriage, costs a franc — that is law — but the hack- 
man always demands more, on some pretence or other, and if 
he gets it he makes a new demand. It is said that a stranger 
took a one-horse carriage for a course — tariff, half a franc. 
He gave the man five francs, by way of experiment. He de- 
manded more, and received another franc. Again he demanded 
more, and got a franc — demanded more, and it was refused. 
He grew vehement — was again refused, and became noisy. 
The stranger said, " Well, give me the seven francs again, and 
I will see what I can do " — and when he got them, he handed 
the hackman half a franc, and he immediately asked for two 
cents to buy a drink with. It may be thought that I am preju- 



AN ITALIAN TRAIT. 



313 



diced. Perhaps I am. I would be ashamed of myself if I 
were not. 

ASCENT OF VESUVIUS CONTINUED. 

"Well, as I was saying, we got our mules and horses, after an 
hour and a half of bargaining with the population of Annun- 
ciation, and started sleepily up the mountain, with a vagrant 
at each mule's tail who pretended to be driving the brute along, 




ASCENT OF VESUVIUS. 



but was really holding on and getting himself dragged up in- 
stead. I made slow headway at first, but I began to get dissat- 
isfied at the idea of paying my minion five francs to hold mj 



314 AX ITALIAN TRAIT. 

mule back by the tail and keep him from going up the hill, 
and so I discharged him. I got along faster then. 

We had one magnificent picture of Naples from a high point 
on the mountain side. We saw nothing but the gas lamps, of 
course — two-thirds of a circle, skirting the great Bay — a neck- 
lace of diamonds glinting up through the darkness from the 
remote distance — less brilliant than the stars overhead, but 
more softly, richly beautiful — and over all the great city the 
lights crossed and recrossed each other in many and many a 
sparkling line and curve. And back of the town, far around 
and abroad over the miles of level campagna, were scattered 
rows, and circles, and clusters of lights, all glowing like so 
many gems, and marking where a score of villages were sleep- 
ing. About this time, the fellow who was hanging on to the 
tail of the horse in front of me and practicing all sorts of un- 
necessary cruelty upon the animal, got kicked some fourteen 
rods, and this incident, together with the fairy spectacle of the 
lights far in the distance, made me serenely happy, and I was 
glad I started to Vesuvius. 

ASCENT OF MOUNT VESUVIUS CONTINUED. 

This subject will be excellent matter for a chapter, and to» 
morrow or next day I will write it. 



OHAPTEE XXX 



ASCENT OF VESUVIUS CONTINUED. 

U Q1EE Naples and die." Well, I do not know that one 
^ would necessarily die after merely seeing it, but to 
attempt to live there might turn out a little differently. To 
see Naples as we saw it in the early dawn from far up on the 
side of Vesuvius, is to see a picture of wonderful beauty. At 
that distance its dingy buildings looked white — and so, rank 
on rank of balconies, windows and roofs, they piled them- 
selves up from the blue ocean till the colossal castle of St. 
Elmo topped the grand white pyramid and gave the picture 
symmetry, emphasis and completeness. And when its lilies 
turned to roses — when it blushed under the sun's first kiss — it 
was beautiful beyond all description. One might well say, 
then, " See Naples and die." The frame of the picture was 
charming, itself. In front, the smooth sea — a vast mosaic of 
many colors ; the lofty islands swimming in a dreamy haze in 
the distance ; at our end of the city the stately double peak of 
Vesuvius, and its strong black ribs and seams of lava stretch- 
ing down to the limitless level campagna — a green carpet that 
enchants the eye and leads it on and on, past clusters of trees, 
and isolated houses, and snowy villages, until it shreds out in 
a fringe of mist and general vagueness far away. It is from 
the Hermitage, there on the side of Vesuvius, that one should 
" see Naples and die." 

But do not go within the walls and look at it in detail. 
That takes away some of the romance of the thing. The 



316 



NAPLES STREETS 



people are filthy in their habits, and this makes filthy streets 
and breeds disagreeable sights and smells. There never was 
a community so prejudiced against the cholera as these Nea- 
politans are. But they have good reason to be. The cholera 
generally vanquishes a Neapolitan when it seizes him, because, 
you understand, before the doctor can dig through the dirt 
and get at the disease the man dies. The upper classes take a 
sea-bath every day, and are pretty decent. 




BAY OF NAPLES. 



The streets are generally about wide enough for one wagon, 
and how they do swarm with people ! It is Broadway re- 
peated in every street, in every court, in every alley ! Such 
masses, such throngs, such multitudes of hurrying, bustling, 
struggling humanity ! We never saw the like of it, hardly 
even in New York, I think. There are seldom any sidewalks, 
and when there are, they are not often wide enough to pass a 
man on without caroming on him. So everybody walks in 
the street — and where the street is wide enough, carriages are 
forever dashing along. Why a thousand people are not run 
over and crippled every day is a mystery that no man can 
solve. 

But if there is an eighth wonder in the world, it must be the 
dwelling-houses of Naples. I honestly believe a good majority 



SHOT-TOWER DWELLINGS. 317 

of them are a hundred feet high ! And the solid brick walls 
are seven feet through. You go up nine nights of stairs be- 
fore you get to the " first" floor. No, not nine, but there or 
thereabouts. There is a little bird-cage of an iron railing in 
front of every window clear away up, up, up, among the eter- 
nal clouds, where the roof is, and there is always somebody look- 
ing out of every window — people of ordinary size looking out 
from the first floor, people a shade smaller from the second, 
people that look a little smaller yet from the third — and from 
thence upward they grow smaller and smaller by a regularly 
graduated diminution, till the folks in the topmost windows 
seem more like birds in an uncommonly tall martin-box than 
any thing else. The perspective of one of these narrow 
cracks of streets, with its rows of tall houses stretching away 
till they come together in the distance like railway tracks ; its 
clothes-lines crossing over at all altitudes and waving their 
bannered raggedness over the swarms of people below ; and 
the white-dressed women perched in balcony railings all the 
way from the pavement up to the heavens — a perspective like 
that is really worth going into Neapolitan details to see. 



ASCENT OF VESUVIUS CONTINUED. 

Naples, with its immediate suburbs, contains six hundred 
and twenty-five thousand inhabitants, but I am satisfied it 
covers no more ground than an American city of one hundred 
and fifty thousand. It reaches up into the air infinitely higher 
than three American cities, though, and there is where the 
secret of it lies. I will observe here, in passing, that the con- 
trasts between opulence and poverty, and magnificence and 
misery, are more frequent and more striking in Naples than in 
Paris even. One must go to the Bois de Boulogne to see 
fashionable dressing, splendid equipages and stunning liveries, 
and to the Faubourg St. Antoine to see vice, misery, hunger, 
rags, dirt — but in the thoroughfares of Naples these things are 
all mixed together. Naked boys of nine years and the fancy- 
dressed children of luxury ; shreds and tatters, and brilliant 



318 SURPRISING WAGES. 

uniforms ; jackass-carts and state-carriages ; beggars, Princes 
and Bishops, jostle each other in every street. At six o'clock 
every evening, all Naples turns out to drive on the Riviere di 
Chiaja, (whatever that may mean ;) and for two hours one may 
stand there and see the motliest and the worst mixed proces- 
sion go by that ever eyes beheld. Princes (there are more 
Princes than policemen in Naples — the city is infested with 
them) — Princes who live up seven flights of stairs and don't 
own any principalities, will keep a carriage and go hungry ; 
and clerks, mechanics, milliners and, strumpets will go without 
their dinners and squander the money on a hack-ride in the 
Chiaja ; the rag-tag and rubbish of the city stack themselves 
up, to the number of twenty or thirty, on a rickety little go- 
cart hauled by a donkey not much bigger than a cat, and they 
drive in the Chiaja ; Dukes and bankers, in sumptuous car- 
riages and with gorgeous drivers and footmen, turn out, also, 
and so the furious procession goes. For two hours rank and 
wealth, and obscurity and poverty clatter along side by side in 
the wild procession, and then go home serene, happy, covered 
with glory ! 

I was looking at a magnificent marble staircase in the 
King's palace, the other day, which, it was said, cost five mil- 
lion francs, and I suppose it did cost half a million, may be. 
I felt as if it must be a fine thing to live in a country where 
there was such comfort and such luxury as this. And then I 
stepped out musing, and almost walked over a vagabond who 
was eating his dinner on the curbstone — a piece of bread and a 
bunch of grapes. When I found that this mustang was clerk- 
ing in a fruit establishment (he had the establishment along 
with him in a basket,) at two cents a day, and that he had no 
palace at home where he lived, I lost some of my enthusiasm 
concerning the happiness of living in Italy. 

This naturally suggests to me a thought about wages here. 
Lieutenants in the army get about a dollar a day, and com- 
mon soldiers a couple of cents. I only know one clerk — he 
gets four dollars a month. Printers get six dollars and a half 
a month, but I have heard of a foreman who gets thirteen. 



MARKET REPORT. 



319 



To be growing suddenly and violently rich, as this man is, 
naturally makes him a bloated aristocrat. The airs he puts on 
are insufferable. 

And, speaking of wages, reminds me of prices of merchan- 
dise. In Paris you pay twelve dollars a dozen for Jouvin's 
best kid gloves ; gloves 
of about as good quality 
sell here at three or four 
dollars a dozen. You 
pay five and six dollars 
apiece for fine linen 
shirts in Paris ; here and 
in Leghorn you pay two 
and a half. In Mar- 
seilles you pay forty dol- 
lars for a first-class dress 
coat made by a good 
tailor, but in Leghorn 
you can get a full dress 
suit for the same money. 
Here you get handsome 
business suits at from 
ten to twenty dollars, 
and in Leghorn you can 
get an overcoat for 
fifteen dollars that would 
cost you seventy in New York. Pine kid boots are worth 
eight dollars in Marseilles and four dollars here. Lyons veL 
vets rank higher in America than those of Genoa. Yet the 
bulk of Lyons velvets you buy in the States are made in 
Genoa and imported into Lyons, where they receive the Lyons 
stamp and are then exported to America. You can buy 
enough velvet in Genoa for twenty-five dollars to make a Hve 
hundred dollar cloak in New York— so the ladies tell me. 
Of course these things bring me back, by a natural and easy 
transition, to the 




MUSTANG. 



320 



ISLAND OF CAPRI 



ASCENT OF VESUVIUS CONTTNTJED. 

And thus the wonderful Blue Grotto is suggested to me. It 
is situated on the Island of Capri, twenty-two miles from 




ISLAND OF CAPRI. 



Naples. We chartered a little steamer and went out there. 
Of course, the police boarded us and put us through a health 
examination, and inquired into our politics, before they would 
let us land. The airs these little insect Governments put on 
are in the last degree ridiculous. They even put a policeman 
on board of our boat to keep an eye on us as long as we were 
in the Capri dominions. They thought we wanted to steal the 
grotto, I suppose. It was worth stealing. The entrance to 
the cave is four feet high and four feet wide, and is in the face 
of a lofty perpendicular cliff— the sea-wall. You enter in 



SEA WONDERS 



321 



small boats — and a tight squeeze it is, too. You can not go in 
at all when the tide is up. Once within, you find yourself in 
an arched cavern about one hundred and sixty feet long, one 
hundred and twenty wide, and about seventy high. How 
deep it is no man knows. It goes down to the bottom of the 
ocean. The waters of this placid subterranean lake are the 
brightest, loveliest blue that can be imagined. They are as 
transparent as plate glass, and their coloring would shame the 
richest sky that ever bent over Italy. No tint could be more 
ravishing, no lustre more superb. Throw a stone into the 




BLUE GROTTO. 



water, and the myriad of tiny bubbles that are created flash out 
a brilliant glare like blue theatrical fires. Dip an oar, and its 
blade turns to splendid frosted silver, tinted with blue. Let a 
man jump in, and instantly he is cased in an armor more gor- 
geous than ever kingly Crusader wore. 

Then we went to Ischia, but I had already been to that 

21 



322 THE POISONED GROTTO. 

island and tired myself to death " resting " a couple of days 
and studying human villainy, with the landlord of the Grande 
Sentinelle for a model. So we went to Procida, and from 
thence to Pozzuoli, where St. Paul landed after he sailed from 
Samos. I landed at precisely the same spot where St. Paul 
landed, and so did Dan and the others. It was a remarkable 
coincidence. St. Paul preached to these people seven days 
before he started to Pome. 

Nero's Baths, the ruins of Baise, the Temple of Serapis; 
Cumse, where the Cumsen Sybil interpreted the oracles, the 
Lake Agnano, with its ancient submerged city still visible far 
down in its depths — these and a hundred other points of inter- 
est we examined with critical imbecility, but the Grotto of the 
Dog claimed our chief attention, because we had heard and 
read so much about it. Every body has written about the 
Grotto del Cane and its poisonous vapors, from Pliny down 
to Smith, and every tourist has held a dog over its floor by the 
legs to test the capabilities of the place. The dog dies in a 
minute and a half — a chicken instantly. As a general thing, 
strangers who crawl in there to sleep do not get up until they 
are called. And then they don't either. The stranger that 
ventures to sleep there takes a permanent contract. I longed 
to see this grotto. I resolved to take a dog and hold him my- 
self ; suffocate him a little, and time him ; suffocate him some 
more and then finish him. We reached the grotto at about 
three in the afternoon, and proceeded at once to make the 
experiments. But now, an important difficulty presented 
itself. We had no dog. 

ASCENT OF VESUVIUS CONTESTED. 

At the Hermitage we were about fifteen or eighteen hun- 
dred feet above the sea, and thus far a portion of the ascent 
had been pretty abrupt. For the next two miles the road was 
a mixture — sometimes the ascent was abrupt and sometimes it 
was not : but one characteristic it possessed all the time, with- 
out failure — without modification — it was all uncompromis- 



THE SUMMIT BEACHED. 323 

ingly and unspeakably infamous. It was a rough, narrow 
trail, and led oyer an old lava flow — a black ocean which was 
tumbled into a thousand fantastic shapes — a wild chaos of 
ruin, desolation, and barrenness — a wilderness of billowy up- 
heavals, of furious whirlpools, of miniature mountains rent 
asunder — of gnarled and knotted, wrinkled and twisted 
masses of blackness that mimicked branching roots, great 
vines, trunks of trees, all interlaced and mingled together: 
and all these weird shapes, all this turbulent panorama, all 
this stormy, far-stretching waste of blackness, with its thrill- 
ing suggestiveness of life, of action, of boiling, surging, 
furious motion, was petrified ! — all stricken dead and cold in 
the instant of its maddest rioting ! — fettered, paralyzed, and 
left to glower at heaven in impotent rage for evermore ! 

Finally we stood in a level, narrow valley (a valley that had 
been created by the terrific march of some old time irruption) 
and on either hand towered the two steep peaks of Vesuvius. 
The one we had to climb — the one that contains the active 
volcano — seemed about eight hundred or one thousand feet 
high, and looked almost too straight-up-and-down for any 
man to climb, and certainly no mule could climb it with a 
man on his back. Four of these native pirates will carry you 
to the top in a sedan chair, if you wish it, but suppose they 
were to slip and let you fall, — is it likely that you would ever 
stop rolling ? Not this side of eternity, perhaps. We left the 
mules, sharpened our finger-nails, and began the ascent I have 
been writing about so long, at twenty minutes to six in the 
morning. The path led straight up a rugged sweep of loose 
chunks of pumice-stone, and for about every two steps for- 
ward we took, we slid back one. It was so excessively steep 
that we had to stop, every fifty or sixty steps, and rest a mo- 
ment. To see our comrades, we had to look very nearly 
straight up at those above us, and very nearly straight down 
at those below. We stood on the summit at last — it had 
taken an hour and fifteen minutes to make the trip. 

What we saw there was simply a circular crater — a circular 
ditch, if you please — about two hundred feet deep, and four 



~L- 



324 THE CRATER. 

or five hundred feet wide, whose inner wall was about half a 
mile in circumference. In the centre of the great circus ring 
thus formed, was a torn and ragged upheaval a hundred feet 
high, all snowed over with a sulphur crust of many and many a 
brilliant and beautiful color, and the ditch inclosed this like 
the moat of a castle, or surrounded it as a little river does a 
little island, if the simile is better. The sulphur coating of 
that island was gaudy in the extreme — all mingled together in 
the richest confusion were red, blue, brown, black, yellow, 
white — I do not know that there was a color, or shade of a 
color, or combination of colors, unrepresented — and when the 
sun burst through the morning mists and fired this , tinted 
magnificence, it topped imperial Vesuvius like a jeweled 
crown ! 

The crater itself — the ditch — was not so variegated in color- 
ing, but yet, in its softness, richness, and unpretentious ele- 
gance, it was more charming, more fascinating to the eye. 
There was nothing " loud " about its well-bred and well-dressed 
look. Beautiful? One could stand and look down upon it 
for a week without getting tired of it. It had the semblance 
of a pleasant meadow, whose slender grasses and whose vel- 
vety mosses were frosted with a shining dust, and tinted with 
palest green that deepened gradually to the darkest hue of the 
orange leaf, and deepened yet again into gravest brown, then 
faded into orange, then into brightest gold, and culminated in 
the delicate pink of a new-blown rose. Where portions of the 
meadow had sunk, and where other portions had been broken 
up like an ice-floe, the cavernous openings of the one, and the 
ragged upturned edges exposed by the other, were hung with 
a lace-work of soft-tinted crystals of sulphur that changed 
their deformities into quaint shapes and figures that were full 
of grace and beauty. 

The walls of the ditch were brilliant with yellow banks 
of sulphur and with lava and pumice-stone of many colors. 
No fire was visible any where, but gusts of sulphurous steam 
issued silently and invisibly from a thousand little cracks and 
fiaeures in the crater, and were wafted to our noses with every 



A POWERFUL TRADITION. 



325 



breeze. But so long as we kept our nostrils buried in our 
handkerchiefs, there was small danger of suffocation. 

Some of the boys thrust long slips of paper down into holes 
and set them on lire, and so achieved the glory of lighting 
their cigars by the flames of Vesuvius, and others cooked eggs 
over fissures in the rocks and were happy. 

The view from the summit would have been superb but for 
the fact that the sun could only pierce the mists at long inter- 
vals. Thus the glimpses we had of the grand panorama be- 
low were only fitful and unsatisfactory. 

THE DESCENT. 



The descent of the mountain was a labor of only four 
minutes. Instead of 
stalking down the rug- 
ged path we ascended, 
we chose one which was 
bedded knee-deep in 
loose ashes, and ploughed 
our way with prodigious 
strides that would al- 
most have shamed the 
performance of him of 
the seven-league boots. 

The Vesuvius of to- 
day is a very poor affair 
compared to the mighty 
volcano of Kilauea, in 
the Sandwich Islands, 
but I am glad I visited 
it. It was well worth 
it. 

It is said that during 
one of the grand erup- 
tions of Vesuvius it discharged massy rocks weighing many- 
tons a thousand feet into the air, its vast jets of smoke and 




THE DESCENT. 



A POWERFUL TRADITION. 

steam ascended thirty miles toward the firmament, and clouds 
of its ashes were wafted abroad and fell upon the decks of 
ships seven hundred and fifty miles at sea ! I will take the 
ashes at a moderate discount, if any one will take the thirty 
miles of smoke, but I do not feel able to take a commanding 
interest in the whole story by myself. 



CHAPTEE XXXI. 



THE BURIED CITY OF POMPEII. 

THEY pronounce it Yom-pay-e. I always had an idea that 
you went down into Pompeii with torches, by the way 
of damp, dark stairways, just as you do in silver mines, and 
traversed gloomy tunnels with lava overhead and some- 
thing on either hand like dilapidated prisons gouged out of the 
solid earth, that faintly resembled houses. But you do nothing 
of the kind. Fully one-half of the buried city, perhaps, is 
completely exhumed and thrown open freely to the light of 
day; and there stand the long rows of solidly-built brick 
houses (roofless) just as they stood eighteen hundred years ago, 
hot with the flaming sun ; and there lie their floors, clean- 
swept, and not a bright fragment tarnished or wanting of the 
labored mosaics that pictured them with the beasts, and birds, 
and flowers which we copy in perishable carpets to-day ; and 
there are the Yenuses, and Bacchuses, and Adonises, making 
love and getting drunk in many-hued frescoes on the walls of 
saloon and bed-chamber ; and there are the narrow streets and 
narrower sidewalks, paved with flags of good hard lava, the 
one deeply rutted with the chariot-wheels, and the other with 
the passing feet of the Pompeiians of by-gone centuries ; and 
there are the bake-shops, the temples, the halls of justice, the 
baths, the theatres — all clean-scraped and neat, and suggesting 
nothing of the nature of a silver mine away down in the 
bowels of the earth. The broken pillars lying about, the door- 
le&s doorways and the crumbled tops of the wilderness of walls, 



328 THE BURIED CITY — CURIOUS FEATURES. 

were wonderfully suggestive of the " burnt district " in one of 
our cities, and if there had been any charred timbers, shattered 
windows, heaps of debris, and general blackness and smokiness 
about the place, the resemblance would have been perfect. 




RUINS. — POMPEII. 



But no — the sun shines as brightly down on old Pompeii 
to-day as it did when Christ was born in Bethlehem, and its 
streets are cleaner a hundred times than ever Pompeiian saw 
them in her prime. I know whereof I speak — for in the great, 
chief thoroughfares (Merchant street and the Street of For- 
tune) have I not seen with my own eyes how for two hundred 
years at least the pavements were not repaired !— how ruts 
five and even ten inches deep were worn into the thick flag- 
stones by the chariot- wheels of generations of swindled tax- 
payers ? And do I not know by these signs that Street Commis- 
sioners of Pompeii never attended to their business, and that 
if they never mended the pavements they never cleaned them ? 
And, besides, is it not the inborn nature of Street Commis- 



THE JUDGMENT SEAT. 329 

sioners to avoid their duty whenever they get a chance % I 
wish I knew the name of the last one that held office in Pom- 
peii so that I could give him a blast. I speak with feeling 
on this subject, because I caught my foot in one of those ruts, 
and the sadness that came over me when I saw the first poor 
skeleton, with ashes and lava sticking to it, was tempered by 
the reflection that may be that party was the Street Commis- 
sioner. 

No — Pompeii is no longer a buried city. It is a city of 
hundreds and hundreds of roofless houses, and a tangled maze 
of streets where one could easily get lost, without a guide, and 
have to sleep in some ghostly palace that had known no living 
tenant since that awful November night of eighteen centuries 
ago. 

We passed through the gate which faces the Mediterranean, 
(called the " Marine Gate,") and by the rusty, broken image 
of Minerva, still keeping tireless watch and ward over the 
possessions it was powerless to save, and went up a long street 
and stood in the broad court of the Forum of Justice. The 
floor was level and clean, and up and down either side was a 
noble colonnade of broken pillars, with their beautiful Ionic 
and Corinthian columns scattered about them. At the upper 
end were the vacant seats of the Judges, and behind them we 
descended into a dungeon where the ashes and cinders had 
found two prisoners chained on that memorable November 
night, and tortured them to death. How they must have 
tugged at the pitiless fetters as the fierce fires surged around 
them! 

Then we lounged through many and many a sumptuous 
private mansion which we could not have entered without a 
formal invitation in incomprehensible Latin, in the olden time, 
when the owners lived there — and we probably wouldn't have 
got it. These people built their houses a good deal alike. 
The floors were laid in fanciful figures wrought in mosaics of 
many-colored marbles. At the threshold your eyes fall upon a 
Latin sentence of welcome, sometimes, or a picture of a dog, 
with the legend " Beware of the L>og," and sometimes a pic- 



330 



FOOTPRINTS OF THE DEPARTED. 



ture of a bear or a faun with no inscription at all. Then you 
enter a sort of vestibule, where they used to keep the hat-rack, 
I suppose ; next a room with a large marble basin in the 
midst and the pipes of a fountain ; on either side are bed- 
rooms ; beyond the fountain is a reception-room, then a little 
garden, dining-room, and so forth and so on. The floors were 
all mosaic, the walls were stuccoed., 01 frescoed, or ornamented 
with bas-reliefs, and here and there were statues, large and 
small, and little fish-pools, and cascades of sparkling water that 
sprang from secret places in the colonnade of handsome pillars 
that surrounded the court, and kept the flower-beds fresh and 




FORUM OF JUSTICE. — POMPEII. 



the air cool. Those Pompeiians were very luxurious in their 
tastes and habits. The most exquisite bronzes we have seen in 
Europe, came from the exhumed cities of Herculaneum and 
Pompeii, and also the finest cameos and the most delicate 
engravings on precious stones ; their pictures, eighteen or nine- 
teen centuries old, are often much more pleasing than the eel- 



FOOTPRINTS OF THE DEPARTED. 331 

ebrated rubbish of the old masters of three centuries ago. 
They were well up in art. From the creation of these works 
of the first, clear up to the eleventh century, art seems hardly 
to have existed at all — at least no remnants of it are left — and 
it was curious to see how far (in some things, at any rate,) these 
old time pagans excelled the remote generations of masters 
that came after them. The pride of the world in sculptures 
seem to be the Laocoon and the Dying Gladiator, in Rome. 
They are as old as Pompeii, were dug from the earth like 
Pompeii ; but their exact age or who made them can only be 
conjectured. But worn, and cracked, without a history, and 
with the blemishing stains of numberless centuries upon them, 
they still mutely mock at all efforts to rival their perfec- 
tions. 

It was a quaint and curious pastime, wandering through this 
old silent city of the dead — lounging through utterly deserted 
streets where thousands and thousands of human beings once 
bought and sold, and walked and rode, and made the place 
resound with the noise and confusion of traffic and pleasure. 
They were not lazy. They hurried in those days. We had 
evidence of that. There was a temple on one corner, and it 
was a shorter cut to go between the columns of that temple 
from one street to the other than to go around — and behold 
that pathway had been worn deep into the heavy flag-stone 
floor of the building by generations of time-saving feet ! They 
would not go around when it was quicker to go through. We 
do that way in our cities. 

Every where, you see things that make you wonder how old 
these old houses were before the night of destruction came — 
things, too, which bring back those long dead inhabitants and 
place them living before your eyes. For instance : The steps 
(two feet thick — lava blocks) that lead up out of the school, 
and the same kind of steps that lead up into the dress circle of 
the principal theatre, are almost worn through ! For ages the 
boys hurried out of that school, and for ages their parents 
hurried into that theatre, and the nervous feet that have been 
dust and ashes for eighteen centuries have left their record for 



332 FOOTPRINTS OF THE DEPARTED. 

us to read to-day. I imagined I could see crowds of gentle- 
men and ladies thronging into the theatre, with tickets for 
secured seats in their hands, and on the wall, I read the imag- 
inary placard, in infamous grammar, "Positively No Free 
List, Except Members of the Press !" Hanging about the 
doorway (I fancied,) were slouchy Pompeiian street-boys utter- 
ing slang and profanity, and keeping a wary eye out for checks. 
I entered the theatre, and sat down in one of the long rows of 
stone benches in the dress circle, and looked at the place for 
the orchestra, and the ruined stag<3, and around at the wide 
sweep of empty boxes, and thought to myself, " This house 
won't pay." I tried to imagine the music in full blast, the 
leader of the orchestra beating time, and the " versatile " So- 
and-So (who had "just returned from a most successful tour 
in the provinces to play his last and farewell engagement of 
positively six nights only, in Pompeii, previous to his depart- 
ure for Herculaneum,") charging around the stage and piling 
the agony mountains high — but I could not do it with such a 
" house " as that ; those empty benches tied my fancy down to 
dull reality. I said, these people that ought to be here have 
been dead, and still, and moldering to dust for ages and ages, 
and will never care for the trifles and follies of life any more 
for ever — " Owing to circumstances, etc., etc., there will not 
be any performance to-night." Close down the curtain. Put 
out the lights. 

And so I turned away and went through shop after shop and 
store after store, far down the long street of the merchants, 
and called for the wares of Pome and the East, but the trades- 
men were gone, the marts were silent, and nothing was left 
but the broken jars all set in cement of cinders and ashes : the 
wine and the oil that once had filled them were gone with 
their owners. 

In a bake-shop was a mill for grinding the grain, and the 
furnaces for baking the bread : and they say that here, in the 
same furnaces, the exhumers of Pompeii found nice, well 
baked loaves which the baker had not found time to remove 
from the ovens the last time he left his shop, because circum- 
stances compelled him to leave in such a hurry. 



FOOTPRINTS OF THE DEPARTED. 333 

In one house (the only building in Pompeii which no woman 
is now allowed to enter,) were the small rooms and short beds 
of solid masonry, just as they were in the old times, and on 
the walls were pictures which looked almost as fresh as if they 
were painted yesterday, but which no pen could have the 
hardihood to describe ; and here and there were Latin inscrip- 
tions — obscene scintillations of wit, scratched by hands that 
possibly were uplifted to Heaven for succor in the midst of a 
driving storm of fire before the night was done. 

In one of the principal streets was a ponderous stone tank, 
and a water-spout that supplied it, and where the tired, heated 
toilers from the Campagna used to rest their right hands when 
they bent over to put their lips to the spout, the thick stone 
was worn down to a broad groove an inch or two deep. 
Think of the countless thousands of hands that had pressed 
that spot in the ages that are gone, to so reduce a stone that is 
as hard as iron ! 

They had a great public bulletin board in Pompeii — a place 
where announcements for gladiatorial combats, elections, and 
such things, were posted — not on perishable paper, but carved 
in enduring stone. One lady, who, I take it, was rich and 
well brought up, advertised a dwelling or so to rent, with 
baths and all the modern improvements, and several hundred 
shops, stipulating that the dwellings should not be put to 
immoral purposes. You can find out who lived in many a 
house in Pompeii by the carved stone door-plates affixed to 
them : and in the same way you can tell who they were that 
occupy the tombs. Every where around are things that reveal 
to you something of the customs and history of this forgotten 
people. But what would a volcano leave of an American city, 
if it once rained its cinders on it ? Hardly a sign or a symbol 
to tell its story. 

In one of these long Pompeiian halls the skeleton of a man 
was found, with ten pieces of gold in one hand and a large key 
in the other. He had seized his money and started toward the 
door, but the fiery tempest caught him at the very threshold, 
and he sank down and died. One more minute of precious 



834 



FOOTPRINTS OF THE DEPARTED. 



time would have saved him. I saw the skeletons of a man, a 
woman, and two young girls. The woman had her hands 
spread wide apart, as if in mortal terror, and I imagined I 
could still trace upon her shapeless face something of the 
expression of wild despair that distorted it when the heavens 
rained fire in these streets, so many ages ago. The girls and 
the man lay with their faces upon their arms, as if they had 
tried to shield them from the enveloping cinders. In one 
apartment eighteen skeletons were found, all in sitting pos- 




HOUSE. — POMPEII. 



tures, and blackened places on the walls still mark their shapes 
and show their attitudes, like shadows. One of them, a 
woman, still wore upon her skeleton throat a necklace, with 
her name engraved upon it — Julie di Diomede. 



THE BRAVE MARTYR TO DUTY. . 335 

But perhaps the most poetical thing Pompeii has yielded to 
modern research, was that grand figure of a Roman soldier, 
clad in complete armor ; who, true to his duty, true to his 
proud name of a soldier of Rome, and full of the stern courage 
which had given to that name its glory, stood to his post 
by the city gate, erect and unflinching, till the hell that raged 
around him burned out the dauntless spirit it could not con- 
quer. 

We never read of Pompeii but we think of that soldier ; we 
can not write of Pompeii without the natural impulse to grant 
to him the mention he so well deserves. Let us remember 
that he was a soldier — not a policeman — and so, praise him. 
Being a soldier, he staid, — because the warrior instinct for- 
bade him to fly. Had he been a policeman he would have 
staid, also — because he would have been asleep. 

There are not half a dozen flights of stairs in Pompeii, and 
no other evidences that the houses were more than one story 
high. The people did not live in the clouds, as do the Vene- 
tians, the Genoese and Neapolitans of to-day. 

We came out from under the solemn mysteries of this city 
of the Yenerable Past — this city which perished, with all its old 
ways and its quaint old fashions about it, remote centuries ago, 
when the Disciples were preaching the new religion, which is 
as old as the hills to us now — and went dreaming among the 
trees that grow over acres and acres of its still buried streets and 
squares, till a shrill whistle and the cry of " All aboard — last 
train for Naples /" woke me up and reminded me that I be- 
longed in the nineteenth century, and was not a dusty mummy, 
caked with ashes and cinders, eighteen hundred years old. 
The transition was startling. The idea of a railroad train 
actually running to old dead Pompeii, and whistling irrever- 
ently, and calling for passengers in the most bustling and 
business-like way, was as strange a thing as one could imagine, 
and as unpoetical and disagreeable as it was strange. 

Compare the cheerful life and the sunshine of this day with 
the horrors the younger Pliny saw here, the 9th of November, 
A. D. 79, when he was so bravely striving to remove his 



336 THE PERISHABLE NATURE OF FAME. 

mother out of reach of harm, while she begged him, with all a 
mother's unselfishness, to leave her to perish and save himself. 

' By this time the murky darkness had so increased that one might have be- 
lieved himself abroad in a black and moonless night, or in a chamber where all the 
lights had been extinguished. On every hand was heard the complaints of women, 
the wailing of children, and the cries of men. One called his father, another his 
son, and another his wife, and only by their voices could they know each other. 
Many in their despair begged that death would come and end their distress. 

" Some implored the gods to succor them, and some believed that this night was 
the last, the eternal night which should engulf the universe 1 

"Even so it seemed to me — and I consoled myself for the coming death with the 
reflection: Behold, the World is passing awat!" 

■x- * •* #- * * * 

After browsing among the stately ruins of Borne, of Baiae, 
of Pompeii, and after glancing down the long marble ranks of 
battered and nameless imperial heads that stretch down the 
corridors of the Vatican, one thing strikes me with a force it 
never had before : the unsubstantial, unlasting character of 
fame. Men lived long lives, in the olden time, and struggled 
feverishly through them, toiling like slaves, in oratory, in 
generalship, or in literature, and then laid them down and 
died, happy in the possession of an enduring history and a 
deathless name. Well, twenty little centuries flutter away, 
and what is left of these things ? A crazy inscription on a 
block of stone, which snuffy antiquaries bother over and tangle 
up and make nothing out of but a bare name (which they spell 
wrong) — no history, no tradition, no poetry — nothing that can 
give it even a passing interest. What may be left of General 
Grant's great name forty centuries hence? This — in the 
Encyclopedia for A. D. 5868, possibly : 

" Uriah S. (or Z.) Graunt — popular poet of ancient times in the Aztec provinces 
of the United States of British America. Some authors say flourished about A. D. 
742 ; but the learned Ah-ah Foo-foo states that he was a cotemporary of Scharks- 
pyre, the English poet, and flourished about A. D. 1328, some three centuries after 
■the Trojan war instead of before it. He wrote ' Bock me to Sleep, Mother.' " 

These thoughts sadden me. I will to bed. 



OHAPTEE XXXII 



HOME, again ! For the first time, in many weeks, the 
ship's entire family met and shook hands on the 
quarter-deck. They had gathered from many points of the 
compass and from many lands, but not one was missing ; theije 
was no tale of sickness or death among the flock to dampen 
the pleasure of the reunion. Once more there was a full 
audience on deck to listen to the sailors' chorus as they got the 
anchor up, and to wave an adieu to the land as we sped away 
from Naples. The seats were full at dinner again, the dom- 
ino parties were complete, and the life and bustle on the upper 
deck in the fine moonlight at night was like old times — old 
times that had been gone weeks only, but yet they were weeks 
so crowded with incident, adventure and excitement, that they 
seemed almost like years. There was no lack of cheerfulness 
on board the Quaker City. For once, her title was a misno- 
mer. 

At seven in the evening, with the western horizon all golden 
from the sunken sun, and specked with distant ships, the full 
moon sailing high over head, the dark blue of the sea under 
foot, and a strange sort of twilight affected by all these dif- 
ferent lights and colors around us and about us, we sighted 
superb Stromboli. With what majesty the monarch held his 
lonely state above the level sea ! Distance clothed him in a 
purple gloom, and added a veil of shimmering mist that so 
softened his rugged features that we seemed to see him through 
a web of silver gauze. His torch was out; his fires were 
smoldering ; a tall column of smoke that rose up and lost 

22 



338 



THE "ORACLE" AT FAULT. 



itself in the growing moonlight was all the sign he gave that 
he was a living Autocrat of the Sea and not the spectre of a 
dead one. 




STROMBOLI. 



At two in the morning we swept through the Straits of 
Messina, and so bright was the moonlight that Italy on the 
one hand and Sicily on the other seemed almost as distinctly 
visible as though we looked at them from the middle of a 
street we were traversing. The city of Messina, milk-white, 
and starred and spangled all over with gaslights, was a fairy 
spectacle. A great party of us were on deck smoking and 
making a noise, and waiting to see famous Scylla and Cha- 
rybdis. And presently the Oracle stepped out with his eternal 
spy-glass and squared himself on the deck like another Colossus 
of Rhodes. It was a surprise to see him abroad at such an 
hour. Nobody supposed he cared any thing about an old fable 
Eke that of Scylla and Charybdis. One of the boys said : 



THE "ORACLE" AT FAULT. 369 

" Hello, doctor, what are you doing up here at this time of 
night ? — "What do you want to see this place for ?" 

"What do /want to see this place for? Young man, little 
do you know me, or you wouldn't ask such a question. I wish 
to see all the places that's mentioned in the Bible." 

" Stuff — this place isn't mentioned in the Bible." 

" It ain't mentioned in the Bible ! — this place ain't — well 
now, what place is this, since you know so much about it V 9 

" Why it's Scylla and Charybdis." 

" Scylla and Cha — confound it, I thought it was Sodom and 
Gomorrah !" 

And he closed up his glass and went below. The above is 
the ship story. Its plausibility is marred a little by the fact 
that the Oracle was not a biblical student, and did not spend 
much of his time instructing himself about Scriptural localities. 
; — They say the Oracle complains, in this hot weather, lately, 
that the only beverage in the ship that is passable, is the 
"butter. He did not mean butter, of course, but inasmuch as 
that article remains in a melted state now since we are out of 
ice, it is fair to give him the credit of getting one long word in 
the right place, anyhow, for once in his life. He said, in 
Rome, that the Pope was a noble-looking old man, but he 
never did think much of his Iliad. 

We spent one pleasant day skirting along the Isles of 
Greece. They are very mountainous. Their prevailing tints 
are gray and brown, approaching to red. Little white villages 
surrounded by trees, nestle in the valleys or roost upon the 
lofty perpendicular sea-walls. 

We had one fine sunset — a rich carmine flush that suffused 
the western sky and cast a ruddy glow far over the sea. — Fine 
sunsets seem to be rare in this part of the world — or at least, 
striking ones. They are soft, sensuous, lovely — they are ex- 
quisite, refined, effeminate, but we have seen no sunsets here 
yet like the gorgeous conflagrations that flame in the track of 
the sinking sun in our high northern latitudes. 

But what were sunsets to us, with the wild excitement upon 
*s of approaching the most renowned of cities ! What cared 



340 SKIRTING THE ISLES OF GREECE. 

we for outward visions, when Agamemnon, Achilles, and a 
thousand other heroes of the great Past were marching in 
ghostly procession through our fancies ? What were sunsets 
to us, who were about to live and breathe and walk in actual 
Athens ; yea, and go far down into the dead centuries and bid 
in person for the slaves, Diogenes and Plato, in the public 
market-place, or gossip with the neighbors about the siege of 
Troy or the splendid deeds of Marathon ? We scorned to con^ 
6ider sunsets. 

We* arrived, and entered the ancient harbor of the Piraeus at 
last. We dropped anchor within half a mile of the village. 
Away off, across the undulating Plain of Attica, could be seen 
a little square-topped hill with a something on it, which our 
glasses soon discovered to be the ruined edifices of the citadel 
of the Athenians, and most prominent among them loomed the 
venerable Parthenon. So exquisitely clear and pure is this 
wonderful atmosphere that every column of the noble structure 
was discernible through the telescope, and even the smaller 
ruins about it assumed some semblance of shape. This at a 
distance of five or six miles. In the valley, near the Acropolis, 
(the square-topped hill before spoken of,) Athens itself could 
be vaguely made out with an ordinary lorgnette. Every body 
was anxious to get ashore and visit these classic localities as 
quickly as possible. No land we had yet seen had aroused 
such universal interest among the passengers. 

But bad news came. The commandant of the Piraeus came 
in his boat, and said we must either depart or else get outside 
the harbor and remain imprisoned in our ship, under rigid 
quarantine, for eleven days ! So we took up the anchor and 
moved outside, to lie a dozen hours or so, taking in supplies, 
and then sail for Constantinople. It was the bitterest disap- 
pointment we had yet experienced. To lie a whole day in 
sight of the Acropolis, and yet be obliged to go away without 
visiting Athens ! Disappointment was hardly a strong enough 
word to describe the circumstances. 

All hands were on deck, all the afternoon, with books and 
maps and glasses, trying to determine which "narrow rocky 



ANCIENT ATHENS. 



341 




ridge " was the Areopagus, which sloping hill the Pnyx, which 
elevation the Museum Hill, and so on. And we got things 
confused. Discussion became heated, and party spirit ran 
high. Church members were gazing with emotion upon a hill 
which they 
said was the 
one St. Paul 
preached 
from, and an- 
other faction 
claimed that 
that hill was 
Hym e 1 1 u s, 
and another 
that it was 
Pentelicon! 
After all the 

trouble, we VIEW OF THE ACROPOLIS, LOOKING WEST. 

could be cer- 
tain of only one thing — the square-topped hill was the Acrop- 
olis, and the grand ruin that crowned it was the Parthenon, 
whose picture we knew in infancy in the school books. 

We inquired of every body who came near the ship, whether 
there were guards in the Piraeus, whether they were strict, 
what the chances were of capture should any of us slip ashore, 
and in case any of us made the venture and were caught, what 
would be probably done to us ? The answers were discour- 
aging : There was a strong guard or police force ; the Piraeus 
was a small town, and any stranger seen in it would surely 
attract attention — capture would be certain. The commandant 
said the punishment would be " heavy ;" when asked " how 
heavy ?" he said it would be " very severe " — that was all we 
could get out of him. 

At eleven o'clock at night, when most of the ship's company 
were abed, four of us stole softly ashore in a small boat, a 
clouded moon favoring the enterprise, and started two and two, 
and far apart, over a low hill, intending to go clear around the 



342 RUNNING THE BLOCKADE. 

Piraeus, out of the range of its police. Picking our way s© 
stealthily over that rocky, nettle-grown eminence, made me 
feel a good deal as if I were on my way somewhere to steal 
something. My immediate comrade and I talked in an under- 
tone about quarantine laws and their penalties, but we found 
nothing cheering in the subject. I was posted. Only a few 
days before, I was talking with our captain, and he mentioned 
the case of a man who swam ashore from a quarantined ship 
somewhere, and got imprisoned six months for it ; and when 
he was in Genoa a few years ago, a captain of a quarantined 
ship went in his boat to a departing ship, which was already 
outside of the harbor, and put a letter on board to be taken to 
his family, and the authorities imprisoned him three months 
for it, and then conducted him and his ship fairly to sea, and 
warned him never to show himself in that port again while he 
lived. This kind of conversation did no good, further than to 
give a sort of dismal interest to our quarantine-breaking expe- 
dition, and so we dropped it. We made the entire circuit of 
the town without seeing any body but one man, who stared at 
us curiously, but said nothing, and a dozen persons asleep on 
the ground before their doors, whom we walked among and 
never woke — but we woke up dogs enough, in all conscience — 
we always had one or two barking at our heels, and several 
times we had as many as ten and twelve at once. They made 
such a preposterous din that persons aboard our ship said they 
could tell how we were progressing for a long time, and where 
we were, by the barking of the dogs. The clouded moon still 
favored us. When we had made the whole circuit, and were 
passing among the houses on the further side of the town, the 
moon came out splendidly, but we no longer feared the light. 
As we approached a well, near a house, to get a drink, the 
owner merely glanced at us and went within. He left the 
quiet, slumbering town at our mercy. I record it here proudly, 
that we didn't do any thing to it. 

Seeing no road, we took a tall hill to the left of the distant 
Acropolis for a mark, and steered straight for it over all ob- 
structions, and over a little rougher piece of country than 



WE BECOME ROBBERS 



343 



exists any where else outside of the State of Nevada, perhaps. 
Part of the way it was covered with small, loose stones — we 
trod on six at a time, and they all rolled. Another part of it 
was dry, loose, newly-ploughed ground. Still another part of 
it was a long stretch of low grape-vines, which were tangle- 
some and troublesome, and which we took to be brambles. 
The Attic Plain, barring the grape-vines, was a barren, deso- 
late, unpoetical waste — I wonder what it was in Greece's Age 
of Glory, five hundred years before Christ ? 

In the neighborhood of one o'clock in the morning, when 
we were heated with fast walking and parched with thirst, 
Denny exclaimed, " Why, these weeds are grape-vines !" and 
in five minutes we had a score of bunches of large, white, deli- 
cious grapes, and were reaching down for more when a dark 
shape rose mysteriously up out of the shadows beside us and 
said " Ho !" And so we left. 

In ten minutes more we struck into a beautiful road, and 
unlike some 
others we 
had stum- 
bled upon at 
intervals, it 
led in the 
right direc- 
tion. We 
followed it. 
It was broad, 
and smooth, 
and white — 
h a n d s o me 
and in per- 
fect repair, 
and shaded 
on both sides 
for a mile or 
so with sin- 
gle ranks of 
trees, and also with luxuriant vineyards. 




ho!" 



Twice we entered 



344 



AMONG THE GLORIES OF THE PAST. 



and stole grapes, and the second time somebody shouted at us 
from some invisible place. Whereupon we left again. We 
speculated in grapes no more on that side of Athens. 

Shortly we came upon an ancient stone aqueduct, built upon 
arches, and from that time forth we had ruins all about us — 
we were approaching our journey's end. We could not see 
the Acropolis now or the high hill, either, and I wanted to 
follow the road till we were abreast of them, but the others 
overruled me, and we toiled laboriously up the stony hill im- 
mediately in our front — and from its summit saw another — 
climbed it and saw another ! It was an hour of exhausting 
work. Soon we came upon a row of open graves, cut in the 

solid rock — (for a while 
one of them served Soc- 
rates for a prison) — we 
passed around the shoul- 
der of the hill, and the 
citadel, in all its ruined 
magnificence, burst upon 
us ! We hurried across 
the ravine and up a 
winding road, and stood 
on the old Acropolis, with 
the prodigious walls of 
the citadel towering 
above our heads. We 
did not stop to inspect 
their massive blocks of 
marble, or measure their 
height, or guess at their 
extraordinary thickness, 
but passed at once 
through a great arched 
passage like a railway 
tunnel, and went straight to the gate that leads to the ancient 
temples. It was locked ! So, after all, it seemed that we were 
not to see the great Parthenon face to face. We sat down and 




THE ASSAULT. 



AMONG THE GLORIES OF THE FAST. 345 

held a council of war. Result: the gate was only a flimsy 
structure of wood — we would break it down. It seemed like 
desecration, but then we had traveled far, and our necessities 
were urgent. We could not hunt up guides and keepers — we 
must be on the ship before daylight. So we argued. This 
was all very fine, but when we came to break the gate, we 
could not do it. We moved around an angle of the wall and 
found a low bastion — eight feet high without — ten or twelve 
within. Denny prepared to scale it, and we got ready to fol- 
low. By dint of hard scrambling he finally straddled the top, 
but some loose stones crumbled away and fell with a crash 
into the court within. There was instantly a banging of doors 
and a shout. Denny dropped from the wall in a twinkling, 
and we retreated in disorder to the gate. Xerxes took that 
mighty citadel four hundred and eighty years before Christ, 
when his five millions of soldiers and camp-followers followed 
him to Greece, and if we four Americans could have remained 
unmolested five minutes longer, we would have taken it too. 

The garrison had turned out — four Greeks. We clamored 
at the gate, and they admitted us. [Bribery and corruption.] 

We crossed a large court, entered a great door, and stood 
upon a pavement of purest white marble, deeply worn by foot- 
prints. Before us, in the flooding moonlight, rose the noblest 
ruins we had ever looked upon — the Propylse ; a small Temple 
of Minerva ; the Temple of Hercules, and the grand Par- 
thenon. [We got these names from the Greek guide, who 
didn't seem to know more than seven men ought to know.] 
These edifices were all built of the whitest Pentelic marble, 
but have a pinkish stain upon them now. Where any part is 
broken, however, the fracture looks like fine loaf sugar. Six 
caryatides, or marble women, clad in flowing robes, support 
the portico of the Temple of Hercules, but the porticos and 
colonnades of the other structures are formed of massive Doric 
and Ionic pillars, whose flutings and capitals are still measur- 
ably perfect, notwithstanding the centuries that have gone 
over them and the sieges they have suffered. The Parthenon, 
originally, was two hundred and twenty-six feet long, one hun 



346 AMONG THE GLORIES OF THE PAST. 

dred wide, and seventy high, and had two rows of great col- 
umns, eight in each, at either end, and single rows of seventeen 



CARYATIDES. 



each down the sides, and was one of the most graceful and 
beautiful edifices ever erected. 

Most of the Parthenon's imposing columns are still standing, 
bnt the roof is gone. It was a perfect building two hundred 
and fifty years ago, when a shell dropped into the Venetian 
magazine stored here, and the explosion which followed 
wrecked and unroofed it. I remember but little about the 
Parthenon, and I have put in one or two facts and figures for 
the use of other people with short memories. Got them from 
the guide-book. 

As we wandered thoughtfully down the marble-paved length 
of this stately temple, the scene about us was strangely im- 
pressive. Here and there, in lavish profusion, were gleaming 
white statues of men and women, propped against blocks of 



A FAIRY VISION. 347 

marble, some of them armless, some without legs, others head- 
less — but all looking mournful in the moonlight, and start- 
lingly human ! They rose up and confronted the midnight 
intmder on every side — they stared at him with stony eyes 
from unlooked-for nooks and recesses ; they peered at him 
over fragmentary heaps far down the desolate corridors ; they 
barred his way in the midst of the broad forum, and solemnly 
pointed with handless arms the way from the sacred fane ; and 
through the roofless temple the moon looked down, and banded 
the floor and darkened the scattered fragments and broken 
itatues with the slanting shadows of the columns. 

What a world of ruined sculpture was about us ! Set up in 
rows — stacked up in piles — scattered broadcast over the wide 
area of the Acropolis — were hundreds of crippled statues of all 
tizes and of the most exquisite workmanship ; and vast frag- 
ments of marble that once belonged to the entablatures, cov- 
ered with bas-reliefs representing battles and sieges, ships of 
war with three and four tiers of oars, pageants and processions 
— every thing one could think of. History says that the tem- 
ples of the Acropolis were filled with the noblest works of 
Praxiteles and Phidias, and of many a great master in sculp- 
ture besides — and surely these elegant fragments attest it. 

We walked out into the grass-grown, fragment-strewn court 
beyond the Parthenon. It startled us, every now and then, to 
»ee a stony white face stare suddenly up at us out of the grass 
with its dead eyes. The place seemed alive with ghosts. I 
half expected to see the Athenian heroes of twenty centuries 
ago glide out of the shadows and steal into the old temple 
they knew so well and regarded with such boundless pride. 

The full moon was riding high in the cloudless heavens, 
now. We sauntered carelessly and unthinkingly to the edge 
of the lofty battlements of the citadel, and looked down — a 
vision! And such a vision! Athens by moonlight! The 
prophet that thought the splendors of the New Jerusalem 
were revealed to him, surely saw this instead ! It lay in the 
level plain right under our feet — all spread abroad like a pic- 
ture — and we looked down upon it as we might have looked 



348 A FAIRY VISION — MARS HILL. 

from a balloon. We saw no semblance of a street, but every 
house, every window, every clinging vine, every projection, 
was as distinct and sharply marked as if the time were noon- 
day ; and yet there was no glare, no glitter, nothing harsh or 
repulsive — the noiseless city was flooded with the mellowest 
light that ever streamed from the moon, and seemed like some 
living creature wrapped in peaceful slumber. On its further 
side was a little temple, whose delicate pillars and ornate front 
glowed with a rich lustre that chained the eye like a spell ; and 
nearer by, the palace of the king reared its creamy walls out 
of the midst of a great garden of shrubbery that was 'flecked 
all over with a random shower of amber lights — a spray of 
golden sparks that lost their brightness in the glory of the 
moon, and glinted softly upon the sea of dark foliage like the 
pallid stars of the milky-way. Overhead the stately columns, 
majestic still in their ruin — under foot the dreaming city — in 
the distance the silver sea — not on the broad earth is there an- 
other picture half so beautiful ! 

As we turned and moved again through the temple, I wished 
that the illustrious men who had sat in it in the remote ages 
could visit it again and reveal themselves to our curious eyes 
— Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Socrates, Phocion, Pytha- 
goras, Euclid, Pindar, Xenophon, Herodotus, Praxiteles and 
Phidias, Zeuxis the painter. What a constellation of cele- 
brated names ! But more than all, I wished that old Diogenes, 
groping so patiently with his lantern, searching so zealously 
for one solitary honest man in all the world, might meander 
along and stumble on our party. I ought not to say it, may 
be, but still I suppose he would have put out his light. 

We left the Parthenon to keep its watch over old Athens, as 
it had kept it for twenty-three hundred years, and went and 
stood outside the walls of the citadel. In the distance was the 
ancient, but still almost perfect Temple of Theseus, and close 
by, looking to the west, was the Bema, from whence Demos- 
thenes thundered his philippics and fired the wavering patri- 
otism of his countrymen. To the right was Mars Hill, where 
the Areopagus sat in ancient times, and where St. Paul denned 



IS '',"'-■ ' in 







ST. PAUL'S CRITICISM. 349 

his position, and below was the market-place where he " dis- 
puted daily " with the gossip-loving Athenians. We climbed 
the stone steps St. Paul ascended, and stood in the square-cut 
place he stood in, and tried to recollect the Bible account of 
the matter — but for certain reasons, I could not recall the 
words. I have found them since : 

" Now while Paul waited for them at Athena, his spirit was stirred in him, 
when he saw the city wholly given up to idolatry. 

" Therefore disputed he in the synagogue with the Jews, and with the devout 
persons, and in the market daily with them that met with him. 

********* 

" And they took him and brought him unto Areopagus, saying, May we know 
what this new doctrine whereof thou speakest is ? 

* * * * * * * * * 

" Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I per- 
ceive that in all things ye are too superstitious ; 

"For as I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this in- 
scription : To the Unknown God. Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly worship, him 
declare I unto you." — Acts, ch. ivii." 

It occurred to us, after a while, that if we wanted to get 
home before daylight betrayed us, we had better be moving. 
So we hurried away. When far on our road, we had a parting 
view of the Parthenon, with the moonlight streaming through 
its open colonnades and touching its capitals with silver. As 
it looked then, solemn, grand, and beautiful it will always 
remain in our memories. 

As we marched along, we began to get over our fears, and 
ceased to care much about quarantine scouts or any body else. 
We grew bold and reckless ; and once, in a sudden burst of 
courage, I even threw a stone at a dog. It was a pleasant 
reflection, though, that I did not hit him, because his master 
might just possibly have been a policeman. Inspired by this 
happy failure, my valor became utterly uncontrollable, and at 
intervals I absolutely whistled, though on a moderate key. 
But boldness breeds boldness, and shortly I plunged into a 
vineyard, in the full light of the moon, and captured a gallon 
of superb grapes, not even minding the presence of a peasant 
who rode by on a mule. Denny and Birch followed my ex- 



350 



RETREATING IN GOOD ORDER. 



ample. Now I had grapes enough for a dozen, but then 
Jackson was all swollen up with courage, too, and he was 
obliged to enter a vineyard presently. The first bunch he 

seized brought trouble. A 
frowsy, bearded brigand 
sprang into the road with; 
a shout, and flourished a 
musket in the light of the 
moon ! We sidled toward 
the Piraeus — not running, 
you understand, but only 




WE SIDLED, NOT RAN. 

advancing with celerity. The brigand shouted again, but still 
we advanced. It was getting late, and we had no time to fool 
away on every ass that wanted to drivel Greek platitudes to us. 
We would just as soon have talked with him as not if we had 
not been in a hurry. Presently Denny said, " Those fellows 
are following us !" 

We turned, and, sure enough, there they were — three fan- 
tastic pirates armed with guns. We slackened our pace to let 
them come up, and in the meantime I got out my cargo of 
grapes and dropped them firmly but reluctantly into the shad- 
ows by the wayside. But I was not afraid. I only felt that 
it was not right to steal grapes. And all the more so when the 
owner was around — and not only around, but with his friends 
around also. The villains came up and searched a bundle Dr. 



TRAVELING IN MILITARY STYLE. 351 

Birch had in his hand, and scowled upon him when they found 
it had nothing in it but some holy rocks from Mars Hill, and 
these were not contraband. They evidently suspected him of 
playing some wretched fraud upon them, and seemed half in- 
clined to scalp the party. But finally they dismissed us with 
a warning, couched in excellent Greek, I suppose, and dropped 
tranquilly in our wake. When they had gone three hundred 
yards they stopped, and we went on rejoiced. But behold, 
another armed rascal came out of the shadows and took their 
place, and followed us two hundred yards. Then he delivered 
us over to another miscreant, who emerged from some myste- 
rious place, and he in turn to another ! For a mile and a half 
our rear was guarded all the while by armed men. I never 
traveled in so much state before in all my life. 

It was a good while after that before we ventured to steal 
any more grapes, and when we did we stirred up another 
troublesome brigand, and then we ceased all further specu- 
lation in that line. I suppose that fellow that rode by on the 
mule posted all the sentinels, from Athens to the Piraeus, 
about us. 

Every field on that long route was watched by an armed 
sentinel, some of whom had fallen asleep, no doubt, but were 
on hand, nevertheless. This shows what sort of a country 
modern Attica is — a community of questionable characters. 
These men were not there to guard their possessions against 
strangers, but against each other ; for strangers seldom visit 
Athens and the Piraeus, and when they do, they go in day- 
light, and can buy all the grapes they want for a trifle. The 
modern inhabitants are confiscators and falsifiers of high re- 
pute, if gossip speaks truly concerning them, and I freely 
believe it does. 

Just as the earliest tinges of the dawn flushed the eastern 
sky and turned the pillared Parthenon to a broken harp hung 
in the pearly horizon, we closed our thirteenth mile of weary, 
round-about marching, and emerged upon the sea-shore abreast 
the ships, with our usual escort of fifteen hundred Pirsean dogs 
howling at our heels. We hailed a boat that was two or three 



352 



ANCIENT ACROPOLIS. 



hundred yards from shore, and discovered in a moment that it 
was a police-boat on the lookout for any quarantine-breakers 
that might chance to be abroad. So we dodged — we were 
used to that by this time — and when the scouts reached the 
spot we had so lately occupied, we were absent. They cruised 
along the shore, but in the wrong direction, and shortly our 
own boat issued from the gloom and took us aboard. They 

had heard our 
signal on the 
ship. We 
rowed noise- 
lessly away, 
and before 
the police- 
boat came in 
sight again, 
we were safe 
at home once 
more. 

Four more 
of our pas- 
sengers were 
anxious to 
visit Athens, 
and started 
half an hour 
after we re- 
turned ; but 
they had not been ashore five minutes till the police discovered 
and chased them so hotly that they barely escaped to their boat 
again, and that was all. They pursued the enterprise no further. 
We set sail for Constantinople to-day, but some of us little 
care for that. We have seen all there was to see in the old 
city that had its birth sixteen hundred years before Christ was 
born, and was an old town before the foundations of Troy were 
laid — and saw it in its most attractive aspect. Wherefore, 
why should we worry ? 




ANCIENT ACROPOLIS. 



RUNNING THE BLOCKADE. 



353 



Two other passengers ran the blockade successfully last 
night. So we learned this morning. They slipped away so 
quietly that they were not missed from the ship for several 
hours. They had the hardihood to march into the Pineus in 
the early dusk and hire a carriage. They ran some danger of 
adding two or three months' imprisonment to the other nov- 
elties of their Holy Land Pleasure Excursion. I admire 
" cheek." * But they went and came safely, and never walked 
a step. 

* Quotation from the Pilgrims. 




23 



CHAPTEE XXXIII 



ITVROM Athens all through the islands of the Grecian Arch- 
-L ipelago, we saw little but forbidding sea-walls and bar- 
ren hills, sometimes surmounted by three or four graceful 
columns of some ancient temple, lonely and deserted — a fitting 
symbol of the desolation that has come upon all Greece in 
these latter ages. We saw no ploughed fields, very few vil- 
lages, no trees or grass or vegetation of any kind, scarcely, and 
hardly ever an isolated house. Greece is a bleak, unsmiling 
desert, without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, appa- 
rently. What supports its poverty-stricken people or its Gov- 
ernment, is a mystery. 

I suppose that ancient Greece and modern Greece compared, 
furnish the most extravagant contrast to be found in history. 
George I., an infant of eighteen, and a scraggy nest of foreign 
office holders, sit in the places of Themistocles, Pericles, and 
the illustrious scholars and generals of the Golden Age of 
Greece. The fleets that were the wonder of the world when 
the Parthenon was new, are a beggarly handful of fishing- 
smacks now, and the manly people that performed such mira- 
cles of valor at Marathon are only a tribe of unconsidered 
slaves to-day. The classic Illyssus has gone dry, and so have 
all the sources of Grecian wealth and greatness. The nation 
numbers only eight hundred thousand souls, and there 
is poverty and misery and mendacity enough among them to 
furnish forty millions and. be liberal about it. Under King 
Otho the revenues of the State were five millions of dollars — 
raised from a tax of one-tenth of all the agricultural product* 



MODERN GREECE, 



355 




ef the land (which tenth the farmer had to bring to the royal 
granaries on pack-mules any distance not exceeding six leagues) 

and from extravagant 
taxes on trade and 
commerce. Out of 
that five millions the; 
small tyrant tried to 
keep an army of ten 
thousand men, pay all 
the hundreds of useless 
Grand Equerries in 
Waiting, First Grooms 
of the Bedchamber, 
Lord High Chancel- 
lors of the Exploded 
Exchequer, and all 
the other absurdities 
which these puppy- 
kingdoms indulge in, 
in imitation of the 
great monarchies; and in addition he set about building a 
white marble palace to cost about five millions itself. The 
result was, simply : ten into five goes no times and none over. 
All these things could not be done with H\e millions, and Otho 
fell into trouble. 

The Greek throne, with its unpromising adjuncts of a rag- 
ged population of ingenious rascals who were out of employ- 
ment eight months in the year because there was little for 
them to borrow and less to confiscate, and a waste of barren 
hills and weed-grown deserts, went begging for a good while. 
It was offered to one of Victoria's sons, and afterwards to va- 
rious other younger sons of royalty who had no thrones and 
were out of business, but they all had the charity to decline 
the dreary honor, and veneration enough for Greece's ancient 
greatness to refuse to mock her sorrowful rags and dirt with a 
tinsel throne in this day of her humiliation — till they came to 
this young Danish George, and he took it. He has finished 



QUEEN OF GREECE. 



356 



IN THE DARDANELLES 



the splendid palace I saw in the radiant moonlight the other 
night, and is doing many other things for the salvation of 
Oreece, they say. 




PALACE OP GREECE. 



We sailed through the barren Archipelago, and into the nar- 
tow channel they sometimes call the Dardanelles and sometimes 
the Hellespont. This part of the country is rich in historic re- 
miniscences, and poor as Sahara in every thing else. For in- 
stance, as we approached the Dardanelles, we coasted along the 
Plains of Troy and past the mouth of the Scamander ; we saw 
where Troy had stood (in the distance,) and where it does not 
iitand now — a city that perished when the world was young. The 
poor Trojans are all dead, now. They were born too late to 
see Noah's ark, and died too soon to see our menagarie. We 
saw where Agamemnon's, fleets rendezvoused, and away inland 
* mountain which the map said was Mount Ida. Within the 



ANCHORED BEFORE CONSTANTINOPLE. 85T 

Hellespont we saw where the original first shoddy contract 
mentioned in history was carried out, and the " parties of the 
second part " gently rebuked by Xerxes. I speak of the fa- 
mous bridge of boats which Xerxes ordered to be built over 
the narrowest part of the Hellespont (where it is only two or 
three miles wide.) A moderate gale destroyed the flimsy 
structure, and the King, thinking that to publicly rebuke the 
contractors might have a good effect on the next set, called 
them out before the army and had them beheaded. In the? 
next ten minutes he let a new contract for the bridge. It has* 
been observed by ancient writers that the second bridge was a 
very good bridge. Xerxes crossed his host of five millions of 
men on it, and if it had not been purposely destroyed, it would 
probably have been there yet. If our Government would re- 
buke some of our shoddy contractors occasionally, it might 
work much good. In the Hellespont we saw where Leander 
and Lord Byron swam across, the one to see her upon whom 
his soul's affections were fixed with a devotion that only death 
could impair, and the other merely for a flyer, as Jack says. 
We had two noted tombs near us, too. On one shore slept 
Ajax, and on the other Hecuba. 

We had water batteries and forts on both sides of the Hel- 
lespont, flying the crimson flag of Turkey, with its white cres- 
cent, and occasionally a village, and sometimes a train of cam- 
els ; we had all these to look at till we entered the broad sea of 
Marmora, and then the land soon fading from view, we resumed 
euchre and whist once more. 

We dropped anchor in the mouth of the Golden Horn at 
daylight in the morning. Only three or four of us were up ta 
see the great Ottoman capital. The passengers do not turn 
out at unseasonable hours, as they used to, to get the earliest 
possible glimpse of strange foreign cities. They are well over 
that. If we were lying in sight of the Pyramids of Egypt, 
they would not come on deck until after breakfast, now-a-days. 

The Golden Horn is a narrow arm of the sea, which branches 
from the Bosporus (a sort of broad river which connects the 
Marmora and Black Seas,) and, curving around, divides the 



358 ANCHORED BEFORE CONSTANTINOPLE. 

city in the middle. Galata and Pera are on one side of the 
Bosporus, and the Golden Horn; Stamboul (ancient Byzan- 
tium) is upon the other. On the other bank of the Bosporus 
is Scutari and other suburbs of Constantinople. This great 
city contains a million inhabitants, but so narrow are its streets, 
and so crowded together are its houses, that it does not cover 
much more than half as much ground as JSTew York City. 
Seen from the anchorage or from a mile or so up the Bospo- 
rus, it is by far the handsomest city we have seen. Its dense 
array of houses swells upward from the water's edge, and 
spreads over the domes of many hills ; and the gardens that 
peep out here and there, the great globes of the mosques, and 
the countless minarets that meet the eye every where, invest 
the metropolis with the quaint Oriental aspect one dreams of 
when he reads books of eastern travel. Constantinople makes 
a noble picture. 

But its attractiveness begins and ends with its picturesque- 
ness. From the time one starts ashore till he gets back again, 
he execrates it. The boat he goes in is admirably miscalcula- 
ted for the service it is built for. It is handsomely and neatly 
fitted up, but no man could handle it well in the turbulent 
currents that sweep down the Bosporus from the Black Sea, 
and few men could row it satisfactorily even in still water. It 
is a long, light canoe (caique,) large at one end and tapering 
to a knife blade at the other. They make that long sharp end 
the bow, and you can imagine how these boiling currents spin 
it about. It has two oars, and sometimes four, and no rudder. 
You start to go to a given point and you run in fifty different 
directions before you get there. First one oar is backing wa- 
ter, and then the other ; it is seldom that both are going ahead 
at once. This kind of boating is calculated to drive an impa- 
tient man mad in a week. The boatmen are the awkwardest, 
the stupidest, and the most unscientific on earth, without 
question. 

Ashore, it was — well, it was an eternal circus. People were 
thicker than bees, in those narrow streets, and the men were 
dressed in all the outrageous, outlandish, idolatrous, extrava' 



ANCHORED BEFORE CONSTANTINOPLE. 359 

gant, thunder-and-lightning costumes that ever a tailor with 
the delirium tremens and seven devils could conceive of. 
There was no freak in dress too crazy to be indulged in ; no 
absurdity too absurd to be tolerated ; no frenzy in ragged dia- 
bolism too fantastic to be attempted. No two men were 
dressed alike. It was a wild masquerade of all imaginable 
costumes — every struggling throng in every street was a dis- 
solving view of stunning contrasts. Some patriarchs wore 
awful turbans, but the grand mass of the infidel horde wore 
the fiery red skull-cap they call a fez. All the remainder of 
the raiment they indulged in was utterly indescribable. 

The shops here are mere coops, mere boxes, bath-rooms, 
closets — any thing you please to call them — on the first floor. 
The Turks sit cross-legged in them, and work and trade and 
smoke long pipes, and smell like — like Turks. That covers 
the ground. Crowding the narrow streets in front of them 
are beggars, who beg forever, yet never collect any thing ; and 
wonderful cripples, distorted out of all semblance of humanity, 
almost ; vagabonds driving laden asses ; porters carrying dry- 
goods boxes as large as cottages on their backs ; peddlers of 
grapes, hot corn, pumpkin seeds, and a hundred other things, 
yelling like fiends ; and sleeping happily, comfortably, serenely, 
among the hurrying feet, are the famed dogs of Constantinople ; 
drifting noiselessly about are squads of Turkish women, draped 
from chin to feet in flowing robes, and with snowy veils bound 
about their heads, that disclose only the eyes and a vague, 
shadowy notion of their features. Seen moving about, far 
away in the dim, arched aisles of the Great Bazaar, they look 
as the shrouded dead must have looked when they walked forth 
from their graves amid the storms and thunders and earth- 
quakes that burst upon Calvary that awful night of the Cruci- 
fixion. A street in Constantinople is a picture which one 
ought to see once — not oftener. 

And then there was the goose-rancher — a fellow who drove 
a hundred geese before him about the city, and tried to sell 
them. He had a pole ten feet long, with a crook in the end of 
it, and occasionally a goose would branch out from the flock 



360 



AN INGENIOUS GOOSE RANCHER, 



and make a lively break around the corner, with wings half 
lifted and neck stretched to its utmost. Did the goose-mer- 
chant get excited ? No. He took his pole and reached after 
that goose with unspeakable sangfroid — took a hitch round his 
neck, and " yanked " him back to his place in the flock with- 
out an effort. He steered his geese with that stick as easily as 




GOOSE-RANCHER. 



another man would steer a yawl. A few hours afterward we 
saw him sitting on a stone at a corner, in the midst of the tur- 
moil, sound asleep in the sun, with his geese squatting around 
him, or dodging out of the way of asses and men. We came 



MARVELOUS CRIPPLES. 361 

by again, within the hour, and he was taking account of stock, 
to see whether any of his flock had strayed or been stolen. 
The way he did it was unique. He put the end of his stick 
within six or eight inches of a stone wall, and made the geese 
march in single file between it and the wall. He counted 
them as they went by. There was no dodging that arrange- 
ment. 

If you want dwarfs — I mean just a few dwarfs for a curi- 
osity — go to Genoa. If you wish to buy them by the gross, 
for retail, go to Milan. There are plenty of dwarfs all over 
Italy, but it did seem to me that in Milan the crop was luxu- 
riant. If you would see a fair average style of assorted crip- 
ples, go to Naples, or travel through the Roman States. But 
if you would see the very heart and home of cripples and 
human monsters, both, go straight to Constantinople. A beg- 
gar in Naples who can show a foot which has all run into one 
horrible toe, with one shapeless nail on it, has a fortune — but 
such an exhibition as that would not provoke any notice in 
Constantinople. The man would starve. Who would pay 
any attention to attractions like his among the rare monsters 
that throng the bridges of the Golden Horn and display their 
deformities in the gutters of Stamboul ? O, wretched impos- 
tor ! How could he stand against the three-legged woman, 
and the man with his eye in his cheek ? How would he blush 
in presence of the man with fingers on his elbow ? Where 
would he hide himself when the dwarf with seven fingers on 
each hand, no upper lip, and his under-jaw gone, came down 
in his majesty? Bismillah ! The cripples of Europe are a 
delusion and a fraud. The truly gifted flourish only in the 
by-ways of Pera and Stamboul. 

That three-legged woman lay on the bridge, with her stock 
In trade so disposed as to command the most striking effect — 
one natural leg, and two long, slender, twisted ones with feet 
on them like somebody else's fore-arm. Then there was a 
man further along who had no eyes, and whose face was the 
color of a fly-blown beefsteak, and wrinkled and twisted like 
a lava-flow — and verily so tumbled and distorted were his fea- 



362 THE GREAT MOSQUE. 

tures that no man could tell the wart that served him for a 
nose from his cheek-bones. In Stamboul was a man with a 
prodigious head, an uncommonly long body, legs eight inches 
long and feet like snow-shoes. He traveled on those feet and 
his hands, and was as sway-backed as if the Colossus of Rhodes 
had been riding him. Ah, a beggar has to have exceedingly 
good points to make a living in Constantinople. A blue-faced 
man, who had nothing to offer except that he had been blown 
up in a mine, would be regarded as a rank impostor, and a 
mere damaged soldier on crutches would never make a cent. 
It would pay him to get a piece of his head taken off, and cul 
tivate a wen like a carpet sack. 

The Mosque of St. Sophia is the chief lion of Constantino- 
ple. You must get a firman and hurry there the first thing. 
We did that. We did not get a firman, but we took along 
four or five francs apiece, which is much the same thing. 

I do not think much of the Mosque of St. Sophia. I sup- 
pose I lack appreciation. We will let it go at that. It is the 
rustiest old barn in heathendom. I believe all the interest 
that attaches to it comes from the fact that it was built for a 
Christian church and then turned into a mosque, without much 
alteration, by the Mohammedan conquerors of the land. They 
made me take off my boots and walk into the place in my 
stocking-feet. I caught cold, and got myself so stuck up with 
a complication of gums, slime and general corruption, that I 
wore out more than two thousand pair of boot-jacks getting 
my boots off that night, and even then some Christian hide 
peeled off with them. I abate not a single boot-jack. 

St. Sophia is a colossal church, thirteen or fourteen hundred 
years old, and unsightly enough to be very, very much older. 
Its immense dome is said to be more wonderful than St. Pe- 
ter's, but its dirt is much more wonderful than its dome, though 
they never mention it. The church has a hundred and sev- 
enty pillars in it, each a single piece, and all of costly marbles 
of various kinds, but they came from ancient temples at Baal- 
bec, Heliopolis, Athens and Ephesus, and are battered, ugly 
and repulsive. They were a thousand years old when this 



THE GREAT MOSQUE. 



363 



church was new, and then the contrast must have been ghast- 
ly — if Justinian's architects did not trim them any. The 
inside of the dome is figured all over with a monstrous inscrip- 
tion in Turkish characters, wrought in gold mosaic, that looks 
as glaring as a circus bill ; the pavements and the marble bal- 




ST. SOPHIA. 



ustrades are all battered and dirty ; the perspective is marred 
every where by a web of ropes that depend from the dizzy 
height of the dome, and suspend countless dingy, coarse oil 
lamps, and ostrich-eggs, six or seven feet above the floor. 
Squatting and sitting in groups, here and there and far and 
near, were ragged Turks reading books, hearing sermons, or 
receiving lessons like children, and in fifty places were more 



tl 



364 THE GREAT MOSQUE. 

of the same sort bowing and straightening up, bowing again 
and getting down to kiss the earth, muttering prayers the 
while, and keeping up their gymnastics till they ought to have 
been tired, if they were not. 

Every where was dirt, and dust, and dinginess, and gloom ; 
every where were signs of a hoary antiquity, but with nothing 
touching or beautiful about it ; every where were those groups 
of fantastic pagans ; overhead the gaudy mosaics and the web 
of lamp-ropes — nowhere was there any thing to win one's love 
or challenge his admiration. 

The people who go into ecstacies over St. Sophia must surely 
get them out of the guide-book (where every church is spokea 
of as being " considered by good judges to be the most mar- 
velous structure, in many respects, that the world has ever 
seen.") Or else they are those old connoisseurs from the wilds 
of New Jersey who laboriously learn the difference between a 
fresco and a fire-plug and from that day forward feel privi- 
leged to void their critical bathos on painting, sculpture and 
architecture forever more. 

We visited the Dancing Dervishes. There were twenty-one 
of them. They wore a long, light-colored loose robe that 
hung to their heels. Each in his turn went up to the priest 
(they were all within a large circular railing) and bowed pro- 
foundly and then went spinning away deliriously and took his 
appointed place in the circle, and continued to spin. When 
all had spun themselves to their places, they were about five or 
six feet apart — and so situated, the entire circle of spinning 
pagans spun itself three separate times around the room. It 
took twenty-five minutes to do it. They spun on the left foot, 
and kept themselves going by passing the right rapidly before 
it and digging it against the waxed floor. Some of them made 
incredible " time." Most of them spun around forty times in 
a minute, and one artist averaged about sixty-one times a min- 
ute, and kept it up during the whole twenty-five. His robe 
filled with air and stood out all around him like a balloon. 

They made no noise of any kind, and most of them tilted 
their heads back and closed their eyes, entranced with a sort of 



THE ONE THOUSAND AND ONE COLUMNS. 365 

devotional ecstacy. There was a rude kind of music, part of 
the time, but the musicians were not visible. None but spin- 
ners were allowed within the circle. A man had to either 
spin or stay outside. It was about as barbarous an exhibition 
as we have witnessed yet. Then sick persons came and lay 
down, and beside them women laid their sick children (one a 
babe at the breast,) and the patriarch of the Dervishes walked 
upon their bodies. He was supposed to cure their diseases by 
trampling upon their breasts or backs or standing on the back 
of their necks. This is well enough for a people who think 
all their affairs are made or marred by viewless spirits of 
the air — by giants, gnomes, and genii — and who still believe, 
to this day, all the wild tales in the Arabian Nights. Even so 
an intelligent missionary tells me. 

We visited the Thousand and One Columns. I do not know 
what it was originally intended for, but they said it was built 
for a reservoir. It is situated in the centre of Constantinople. 
You go down a night of stone steps in the middle of a barren 
place, and there you are. You are forty feet under ground, 
and in the midst of a perfect wilderness of tall, slender, gran- 
ite columns, of Byzantine architecture. Stand where you 
would, or change your position as often as you pleased, you 
were always a centre from which radiated a dozen long arch- 
ways and colonnades that lost themselves in distance and the 
sombre twilight of the place. This old dried-up reservoir is 
occupied by a few ghostly silk-spinners now, and one of them 
showed me a cross cut high up in one of the pillars. I sup- 
pose he meant me to understand that the institution was there 
before the Turkish occupation, and I thought he made a re- 
mark to that effect ; but he must have had an impediment in 
his speech, for I did not understand him. 

We took off our shoes and went into the marble mausoleum 
of the Sultan Mahmoud, the neatest piece of architecture, in- 
side, that I have seen lately. Mahmoud's tomb was covered 
with a black velvet pall, which was elaborately embroidered 
with silver ; it stood within a fancy silver railing ; at the sides 
and corners were silver candlesticks that would weigh more 



THE SULTAN'S TOMB 



than a hundred pounds, and they supported candles as large aa 
on the top of the sarcophagus was a fez, with a 



a man's leg ; 



handsome diamond ornament upon it, which an attendant said 
cost a hundred thousand pounds, and lied like a Turk when 
he said it. Mahmoud's whole family were comfortably planted 
around him. 




TURKISH MAUSOLEUM. 

We went to the great Bazaar in Stamboul, of course, and I 
shall not describe it further than to say it is a monstrous hive 
of little shops — thousands, I should say — all under one roof^ 
and cut up into innumerable little blocks by narrow streets 
which are arched overhead. One street is devoted to a partic- 
ular kind of merchandise^ another to another, and so on. 



THE GREAT BAZAAR. 367 

When you wish to buy a pair of shoes you have the swing of 
the whole street — you do not have to walk yourself down 
hunting stores in different localities. It is the same with silks, 
antiquities, shawls, etc. The place is crowded with people all 
the time, and as the gay-colored Eastern fabrics are lavishly 
displayed before every shop, the great Bazaar of Stamboul is 
one of the sights that are worth seeing. It is full of life, and 
stir, and business, dirt, beggars, asses, yelling peddlers, porters, 
dervishes, high-born Turkish female shoppers, Greeks, and 
weird-looking and weirdly dressed Mohammedans from the 
mountains and the far provinces — and the only solitary thing 
©ne does not smell when he is in the Great Bazaar, ig some- 
thing which smells good. 



uu^H 



CHAPTER XXXIY. 

MOSQUES are plenty, churches are plenty, graveyards are 
plenty, but morals and whiskey are scarce. The Koran 
does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural in- 
stincts do not permit them to be moral. They say the Sultan 
has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy. 
It makes our cheeks burn with shame to see such a thing per- 
mitted here in Turkey. We do not mind it so much in Salt 
Lake, however. 

Circassian and Georgian girls are still sold in Constantino- 
ple by their parents, but not publicly. The great slave marts 
we have all read so much about — where tender young girls 
were stripped for inspection, and criticised and discussed just 
as if they were horses at an agricultural fair — no longer exist. 
The exhibition and the sales are private now. Stocks are up, 
just at present, partly because of a brisk demand created by 
the recent return of the Sultan's suite from the courts of 
Europe ; partly on account of an unusual abundance of bread- 
stuffs, which leaves holders untortured by hunger and enables 
them to hold back for high prices ; and partly because buyers 
are too weak to bear the market, while sellers are amply pre- 
pared to bull it. Under these circumstances, if the American 
metropolitan newspapers were published here in Constantino- 
ple, their next commercial report would read about as follows, 
I suppose : 

SLAVE GIRL MARKET REPORT. 

"Beet brands Circassians, crop of 1850, £200; 1852, £250; 1854, £300. Best 
brands Georgian, none in market ; second quality, 1851, £180. Nineteen fair to 



SCARCITY OF MORALS AND WHISKEY. 869 

middling "Wallachian girls offered at£130@150, but no takers; sixteen prime A 1 
sold in sm all lots to close out — terms private. 

"Sales of one lot Circassians, prime to good, 1852 to 1854, at £240 @ 242|, buyer 
30; one forty-niner — damaged — at £23, seller ten, no deposit. Several Georgians, 
fancy brands, 1852, changed hands to fill orders. The Georgians now on hand are 
mostly last year's crop, which was unusually poor. The new crop is a little back- 
ward, but will be coming in shortly. As regards its quantity and quality, the ac- 
counts are most encouraging. In this connection we can safely say, also, that the 
new crop of Circassians is looking extremely well. His Majesty the Sultan has 
already sent in large orders for his new harem, which will be finished within a fort- 
night, and this has naturally strengthened the market and given Circassian stock a 
strong upward tendency. Taking advantage of the inflated market, many of our 
shrewdest operators are selling short. There are hints of a "corner" on Walla- 
chians. 

" There is nothing new in Nubians. Slow sale. 

" Eunuchs — None offering ; however, large cargoes are expected from Egypt to- 
day." 

I think the above would be about the style of the commer- 
cial report. Prices are pretty high now, and holders firm ; 
but, two or three years ago, parents in a starving condition 
brought their young daughters down here and sold them for 
even twenty and thirty dollars, when they could do no better, 
simply to save themselves and the girls from dying of want. 
It is sad to think of so distressing a thing as this, and I for one 
am sincerely glad the prices are up again. 

Commercial morals, especially, are bad. There is no gain- 
saying that. Greek, Turkish and Armenian morals consist only 
in attending church regularly on the appointed Sabbaths, and 
in breaking the ten commandments all the balance of the week. 
It comes natural to them to lie and cheat in the first place, and 
then they go on and improve on nature until they arrive at 
perfection. In recommending his son to a merchant as a val- 
uable salesman, a father does not say he is a nice, moral, up- 
right boy, and goes to Sunday School and is honest, but he 
says, " This boy is worth his weight in broad pieces of a hun- 
dred — for behold, he will cheat whomsoever hath dealings 
with him, and from the Euxine to the waters of Marmora there 
abideth not so gifted a liar 1" How is that for a recommenda- 
tion ? The Missionaries tell me that they hear encomiums like 
that passed upon people every day. They say of a person they 

U 






870 THE SLANDERED DOGS. 

admire, " Ah, he is a charming swindler, and a most exquisite 
liar !" 

Every body lies and cheats — every body who is in business, 
at any rate. Even foreigners soon have to come down to the 
custom of the country, and they do not buy and sell long in 
Constantinople till they lie and cheat like a Greek. I say 
like a Greek, because the Greeks are called the worst trans- 
gressors in this line. Several Americans long resident in Con- 
stantinople contend that most Turks are pretty trustworthy, 
but few claim that the Greeks have any virtues that a man can 
discover — at least without a fire assay. 

I am half willing to believe that the celebrated dogs of Con- 
stantinople have been misrepresented — slandered. I have 
always been led to suppose that they were so thick in the 
streets that they blocked the way; that they moved about in 
organized companies, platoons and regiments, and took what 
they wanted by determined and ferocious assault ; and that at 
night they drowned all other sounds with their terrible howl- 
ings. The dogs I see here can not be those I have read of. 

I find them every where, but not in strong force. The most 
I have found together has been about ten or twenty. And 
night or day a fair proportion of them were sound asleep. 
Those that were not asleep always looked as if they wanted 
to be. I never saw such utterly wretched, starving, sad-vis- 
aged, broken-hearted looking curs in my life. It seemed a 
grim satire to accuse such brutes as these of taking things by 
force of arms. They hardly seemed to have strength enough 
or ambition enough to walk across the street — I do not know 
that I have seen one walk that far yet. They are mangy and 
bruised and mutilated, and often you see one with the hair 
singed off him in such wide and well defined tracts that he 
looks like a map of the new Territories. They are the sorriest 
beasts that breathe — the most abject — the most pitiful. In 
their faces is a settled expression of melancholy, an air of hope- 
less despondency. The hairless patches on a scalded dog are 
preferred by the fleas of Constantinople to a wider range on a 
healthier dog ; and the exposed places suit the fleas exactly. I 



SOCIAL STATUS OF THE DOGS. 



371 



saw a dog of this kind start to nibble at a flea — a fly attracted 
his attention, and he made a snatch at him ; the flea called for 
him once more, and that forever unsettled him; he looked 
sadly at his flea-pasture, then sadly looked at his bald spot. 
Then he heaved a sigh and dropped his head resignedly upom 
his paws. He was not equal to the situation. 




SLANDERED DOGS. 

The dogs sleep in the streets, all over the city. From one 
end of the street to the other, I suppose they will average 
about eight or ten to a block. Sometimes, of course, there are 
fifteen or twenty to a block. They do not belong to any body, 
and they seem to have no close personal friendships among each 
other. But they district the city themselves, and the dogs of 
each district, whether it be half a block in extent, or ten 
blocks, have to remain within its bounds. Woe to a dog if he 
crosses the line ! His neighbors would snatch the balance of 
his hair off in a second. So it is said. But they don't look it. 

They sleep in the streets these days. They are my com- 
pass — my guide. WTien I see the dogs sleep placidly on, 
while men, sheep, geese, and all moving things turn out and 
go around them, I know I am not in the great street where the 
hotel is, and must go further. In the Grand Kue the dogs 
have a sort of air of being on the lookout — an air born of be- 



^■—^^■B^^^— MINIUM 



372 SOCIAL STATUS OF THE DOGS. 

ing obliged to get out of the way of many 'carriages every 
day — and that expression one recognizes in a moment. It 
does not exist upon the face of any dog without the confines 
of that street. All others sleep placidly and keep no watch. 
They would not move, though the Sultan himself passed by. 

In one narrow street (but none of them are wide) I saw three 
dogs lying coiled up, about a foot or two apart. End to end 
they lay, and so they just bridged the street neatly, from gut- 
ter to gutter. A drove of a hundred sheep came along. They 
stepped right over the dogs, the rear crowding the front, impa- 
tient to get on. The dogs looked lazily up, flinched a little 
when the impatient feet of the sheep touched their raw backs — 
sighed, and lay peacefully down again. ~No talk could be 
plainer than that. So some of the sheep jumped over them 
and others scrambled between, occasionally chipping a leg with 
their sharp hoofs, and when the whole flock had made the 
trip, the dogs sneezed a little, in the cloud of dust, but never 
budged their bodies an inch. I thought I was lazy, but I am 
a steam-engine compared to a Constantinople dog. But was 
not that a singular scene for a city of a million inhabitants ? 

These dogs are the scavengers of the city. That is their 
official position, and a hard one it is. However, it is their 
protection. But for their usefulness in partially cleansing 
these terrible streets, they would not be tolerated long. They 
eat any thing and every thing that comes in their way, from 
melon rinds and spoiled grapes up through all the grades and 
species of dirt and refuse to their own dead friends and rela- 
tives — and yet they are always lean, always hungry, always 
despondent. The people are loath to kill them — do not kill 
them, in fact. The Turks have an innate antipathy to taking 
the life of any dumb animal, it is said. But they do worse. 
They hang and kick and stone and scald these wretched crea- 
tures to the very verge of death, and then leave them to live 
and suffer. 

Once a Sultan proposed to kill off all the dogs here, and 
did begin the work — but the populace raised such a howl of 
horror about it that the massacre was stayed. After a while, 



PERILS OF JOURNALISM IN TURKEY. 37S 

he proposed to remove them all to an island in the Sea of Mar- 
mora. No objection was offered, and a ship-load or so was 
taken away. But when it came to be known that somehow or 
other the dogs never got to the island, but always fell over- 
board in the night and perished, another howl was raised and 
the transportation scheme was dropped. 

So the dogs remain in peaceable possession of the streets. 
I do not say that they do not howl at night, nor that they do 
not attack people who have not a red fez on their heads. I 
only say that it would be mean for me to accuse them of these 
unseemly things who have not seen them do them with my 
own eyes or heard them with my own ears. 

I was a little surprised to see Turks and Greeks playing 
newsboy right here in the mysterious land where the giants 
and genii of the Arabian Nights once dwelt — where winged 
horses and hydra-headed dragons guarded enchanted castles — 
where Princes and Princesses flew through the air on carpets 
that obeyed a mystic talisman — where cities whose houses were 
made of precious stones sprang up in a night under the hand 
of the magician, and where busy marts were suddenly stricken 
with a spell and each citizen lay or sat, or stood with weapon 
raised or foot advanced, just as he was, speechless and motion- 
less, till time had told a hundred years ! 

It was curious to see newsboys selling papers in so dreamy a 
land as that. And, to say truly, it is comparatively a new 
thing here. The selling of newspapers had its birth in Con- 
stantinople about a year ago, and was a child of the Prussian 
and Austrian war. 

There is one paper published here in the English lan- 
guage — The Levant Herald — and there are generally a number 
of Greek and a few French papers rising and falling, strug- 
gling up and falling again. Newspapers are not popular with 
the Sultan's Government. They do not understand jour- 
nalism. The proverb says, " The unknown is always great." 
To the court, the newspaper is a mysterious and rascally insti- 
tution. They know what a pestilence is, because they have 
one occasionally that thins the people out at the rate of two 



874 



INGENIOUS ITALIAN JOUKNALISM. 



thousand a day, and they regard a newspaper as a mild form 
«f pestilence. When it goes astray, they suppress it — pounce 
upon it without warning, and throttle it. When it don't go 
astray for a long time, they get suspicious and throttle it anyhow, 
because they think it is hatching deviltry. Imagine the Grand 
Yizier in solemn council with the magnates of the realm;, 
spelling his way through the hated newspaper, and finally 
delivering his profound decision : " This thing means mis- 
chief — it is too darkly, too suspiciously inoffensive — suppress 
it ! Warn the publisher that we can not have* this sort of 
thing : put the editor in prison !" 




THE CENSOR ON DUTY. 



The newspaper business has its inconveniences in Constants 
nople. Two Greek papers and one French one were sup- 
pressed here within a few days of each other. No victories of 
the Cretans are allowed to be printed. From time to time the 
Grand Yizier sends a notice to the various editors that the 
Cretan insurrection is entirely suppressed, and although that 



INGENIOUS ITALIAN JOURNALISM. 375 

editor knows better, he still has to print the notice. The Le- 
vant Herald is too fond of speaking praisefully of Americans 
to be popular with the Sultan, who does not relish our sympa- 
thy with the Cretans, and therefore that paper has to be par- 
ticularly circumspect in order to keep out of trouble. Once 
the editor, forgetting the official notice in his paper that the 
Cretans were crushed out, printed a letter of a very different 
tenor, from the American Consul in Crete, and was fined two 
hundred and fifty dollars for it. Shortly he printed another 
from the same source and was imprisoned three months for his 
pains. I think I could get the assistant editorship of the Le- 
vant Herald, but I am going to try to worry along without it. 

To suppress a paper here involves the ruin of the publisher, 
almost. But in Naples I think they speculate on misfortunes 
of that kind. Papers are suppressed there every day, and 
spring up the next day under a new name. During the ten 
days or a fortnight we staid there one paper was murdered and 
resurrected twice. The newsboys are smart there, just as they 
are elsewhere. They take advantage of popular weaknesses. 
When they find they are not likely to sell out, they approach 
a citizen mysteriously, and say in a low voice — " Last copy, 
sir : double price ; paper just been suppressed !" The man 
buys it, of course, and finds nothing in it. They do say — I do 
not vouch for it — but they do say that men sometimes print a 
vast edition of a paper, with a ferociously seditious article in 
it, distribute it quickly among the newsboys, and clear out till 
the Government's indignation cools. It pays well. Confisca- 
tion don't amount to any thing. The type and presses are not 
worth taking care of. 

There is only one English newspaper in Naples. It has 
seventy subscribers. The publisher is getting rich very delib- 
erately — very deliberately indeed. 

I never shall want another Turkish lunch. The cooking ap- 
paratus was in the little lunch room, near the bazaar, and it 
was all open to the street. The cook was slovenly, and so was 
the table, and it had no cloth on it. The fellow took a mass 
of sausage-meat and coated it round a wire and laid it on a 



376 THE NARGHILI FRAUD. 

charcoal fire to cook. When it was done, lie laid it aside 
and a dog walked sadly in and nipped it. He smelt it first, 
and probably recognized the remains of a friend. The cook 
took it away from him and laid it before us. Jack said, " I 
pass " — he plays euchre sometimes — and we all passed in turn. 
Then the cook baked a broad, flat, wheaten cake, greased it 
well with the sausage, and started towards us with it. It 
dropped in the dirt, and he picked it up and polished it on his 
breeches, and laid it before us. Jack said, " I pass." We all 
passed. He put some eggs in a frying pan, and stood pensively 
prying slabs of meat from between his teeth with a fork. 
Then he used the fork to turn the eggs with — and brought 
them along. Jack said " Pass again.' 7 All followed suit. 
We did not know what to do, and so we ordered a new ra- 
tion of sausage. The cook got out his wire, apportioned a 
proper amount of sausage-meat, spat it on his hands and fell 
to work ! This time, with one accord, we all passed out. We 
paid and left. That is all I learned about Turkish lunches. A 
Turkish lunch is good, no doubt, but it has its little draw- 
backs. 

When I think how I have been swindled by books of Oriental 
travel, I want a tourist for breakfast. For years and years I 
have dreamed of the wonders of the Turkish bath ; for years 
and years I have promised myself that I would yet enjoy one. 
Many and many a time, in fancy, I have lain in the marble 
bath, and breathed the slumbrous fragrance of Eastern spices 
that filled the air ; then passed through a weird and complica- 
ted system of pulling" and hauling, and drenching and scrub- 
bing, by a gang of naked savages who loomed vast and vaguely 
through the steaming mists, like demons ; then rested for a 
while on a divan fit for a king ; then passed through another 
complex ordeal, and one more fearful than the first; and, 
finally, swathed in soft fabrics, been conveyed to a princely sa- 
loon and laid on a bed of eider down, where eunuchs, gorgeous 
of costume, fanned me while I drowsed and dreamed, or con- 
tentedly gazed at the rich hangings of the apartment, the soft 
carpets, the sumptuous furniture, the pictures, and drank deli- 



THE TURKISH BATH. 377 

cious coffee, smoked the soothing narghili, and dropped, at the 
last, into tranquil repose, lulled by sensuous odors from un- 
seen censers, by the gentle influence of the narghili's Persian 
tobacco, and by the music of fountains that counterfeited the 
pattering of summer rain. 

That was the picture, just as I got it from incendiary books 
of travel. It was a poor, miserable imposture. The reality 
is no more like it than the Five Points are like the Garden of 
Eden. They received me in a great court, paved with marble 
slabs ; around it were broad galleries, one above another, car- 
peted with seedy matting, railed with unpainted balustrades, 
and furnished with huge rickety chairs, cushioned with rusty 
old mattresses, indented with impressions left by the forms of 
nine successive generations of men who had reposed upon them. 
The place was vast, naked, dreary ; its court a barn, its galle- 
ries stalls for human horses. The cadaverous, half nude var- 
lets that served in the establishment had nothing of poetry in 
their appearance, nothing of romance, nothing of Oriental 
splendor. They shed no entrancing odors — just the contrary. 
Their hungry eyes and their lank forms continually suggested 
one glaring, unsentimental fact — they wanted what they term 
in California " a square meal." 

I went into one of the racks and undressed. An unclean 
starveling wrapped a gaudy table-cloth about his loins, and 
hung a white rag over my shoulders. If I had had a tub then, 
it would have come natural to me to take in washing. I was 
then conducted down stairs into the wet, slippery court, and 
the first things that attracted my attention were my heels. My 
fall excited no comment. They expected it, no doubt. It 
belonged in the list of softening, sensuous influences peculiar 
to this home of Eastern luxury. It was softening enough, cer- 
tainly, but its application was not happy. They now gave me 
a pair of wooden clogs — benches in miniature, with leather 
straps over them to confine my feet (which they would have 
done, only I do not wear ~No. 13s.) These things dangled un- 
comfortably by the straps when I lifted up my feet, and came 
down in awkward and unexpected places when I put them on 



378 



THE TURKISH BATH. 



the floor again, and sometimes turned sideways and wrenched 
my ankles out of joint. However, it was all Oriental luxury, 
and I did what I could to enjoy it. 




TURKISH BATH. 



They put me in another part of the barn and laid me on a 
atuffy sort of pallet, which was not made of cloth of gold.or 
Persian shawls, but was merely the unpretending sort of thing 
I have seen in the negro quarters of Arkansas There was 
nothing whatever in this dim marble prison but five more at 
these biers. It was a very solemn place. I expected that the 
spiced odors of Araby were going to steal over my senses now, 
but they did not. A copper-colored skeleton, with a rag 



THE TURKISH BATH. 379 

around him, brought me a glass decanter of water, with a 
lighted tobacco pipe in the top of it, and a pliant stem a yard 
long, with a brass mouth-piece to it. 

It was the famous " narghili " of the East — the thing the 
Grand Turk smokes in the pictures. This began to look like 
luxury. I took one blast at it, and it was sufficient ; the smoke 
went in a great volume down into my stomach, my lungs, 
even into the uttermost parts of my frame. I exploded one 
mighty cough, and it was as if Vesuvius had let go. For the 
next Rye minutes I smoked at every pore, like a frame house 
that is on lire on the inside. Not any more narghili for me. 
The smoke had a vile taste, and the taste of a thousand infidel 
tongues that remained on that brass mouthpiece was viler still. 
I was getting discouraged. Whenever, hereafter, I see the 
cross-legged Grand Turk smoking his narghili, in pretended 
bliss, on the outside of a paper of Connecticut tobacco, I shall 
know him for the shameless humbug he is. 

This prison was filled with hot air. When I had got 
warmed up sufficiently to prepare me for a still warmer tem- 
perature, they took me where it was — into a marble room, 
wet, slippery and steamy, and laid me out on a raised platform 
in the centre. It was very warm. Presently my man sat me 
down by a tank of hot water, drenched me well, gloved his 
hand with a coarse mitten, and began to polish me all over 
with it. I began to smell disgreeably. The more he polished 
the worse I smelt. It was alarming. I said to him : 

" I perceive that I am pretty far gone. It is plain that I 
ought to be buried without any unnecessary delay. Perhaps 
you had better go after my friends at once, because the weather 
is warm, and I can not ' keep ' long.' " 

He went on scrubbing, and paid no attention. I soon saw 
that he was reducing my size. He bore hard on his mitten, 
and from under it rolled little cylinders, like maccaroni. It 
could not be dirt, for it was too white. He pared me down in 
this way for a long time. Finally I said : 

" It is a tedious process. It will take hours to trim me to 
the size you want me ; I will wait ; go and borrow a jack-plane." 



380 JACK-PLANED BY A NATIVE. 

He paid no attention at all. 

After a while he brought a basin, some soap, and something 
that seemed to be the tail of a horse. He made up a prodi- 
gious quantity of soap-suds, deluged me with them from head 
to foot, without warning me to shut my eyes, and then swabbed 
me viciously with the horse-tail. Then he left me there, a 
snowy statue of lather, and went away. When I got tired of 
waiting I went and hunted him up. He was propped against 
the wall, in another room, asleep. I woke him. He was not 
disconcerted. He took me back and' flooded me with hot wa- 
ter, then turbaned my head, swathed me with dry tjable-cloths, 
and conducted me to a latticed chicken-coop in one of the gal- 
leries, and pointed to one of those Arkansas beds. I mounted 
it, and vaguely expected the odors of Araby again. They did 
not come. 

The blank, unornamented coop had nothing about it of that 
oriental voluptuousness one reads of so much. It was more 
suggestive of the county hospital than any thing else. The 
skinny servitor brought a narghili, and I got him to take it out 
again without wasting any time about it. Then he brought 
the world-renowned Turkish coffee that poets have sung so 
rapturously for many generations, and I seized upon it as the 
last hope that was left of my old dreams of Eastern luxury. 
It was another fraud. Of all the unchristian beverages that 
ever passed my lips, Turkish coffee is the worst. The cup is 
small, it is smeared with grounds ; the coffee is black, thick, 
unsavory of smell, and execrable in taste. The bottom of the 
cup has a muddy sediment in it half an inch deep. This goes 
down your throat, and portions of it lodge by the way, and 
produce a tickling aggravation that keeps you barking and 
coughing for an hour. 

Here endeth my experience of the celebrated Turkish bath, 
and here also endeth my dream of the bliss the mortal revels 
in who passes through it. It is a malignant swindle. The man 
who enjoys it is qualified to enjoy any thing that is repulsive 
to sight or sense, and he that can invest it with a charm of 
poetry is able to do the same with any thing else in the world 
that is tedious, and wretched, and^dismal, and nasty. 



CHAPTER XXXV. 

~TTT"E left a dozen passengers in Constantinople, and sailed 
* V through the beautiful Bosporus and far up into the 
Black Sea. We left them in the clutches of the celebrated 
Turkish guide, " Far-away Moses," who will seduce them into 
buying a ship-load of ottar of roses, splendid Turkish vest- 
ments, and all manner of curious things they can never have 
any use for. Murray's invaluable guide-books have mentioned 
Far-away Moses' name, and he is a made man. He rejoices 
daily in the fact that he is a recognized celebrity. However, 
we can not alter our established customs to please the whims 
of guides ; we can not show partialities this late in the day. 
Therefore, ignoring this fellow's brilliant fame, and ignoring 
the fanciful name he takes such pride in, we called him Fer- 
guson, just as we had done with all other guides. It has kept 
him in a state of smothered exasperation all the time. Yet we 
meant him no harm. After he has gotten himself up regardless 
of expense, in showy, baggy trowsers, yellow, pointed slippers, 
fiery fez, silken jacket of blue, voluminous waist-sash of fancy 
Persian stuff filled with a battery of silver-mounted horse- 
pistols, and has strapped on his terrible scimetar, he considers 
it an unspeakable humiliation to be called Ferguson. It can 
not be helped. All guides are Fergusons to us. We can not 
master their dreadful foreign names. 

Sebastopol is probably the worst battered town in Russia 01 
any where else. But we ought to be pleased with it, neverthe- 
less, for we have been m no country yet where we have been 
so kindly received, and where we felt that to be Americans 



382 



OUK KIND EXCEPTION IN RUSSIA. 



was a sufficient vise for our passports. The moment the anchor 
was down, the Governor of the town immediately dispatched 

an officer on board to inquire 
if he could be of any assist- 
ance to us, and to invite us to 
make ourselves at home in Se- 
bastopol ! If you know Rus- 
sia, you know that this was a 
wild stretch of hospitality. 
They are usually so suspicious 
of strangers that they worry 
them excessively with the de- 
lays and aggravations incident 
to a complicated passport sys- 
tem. Had we come from any 
other country we could not 
have had permission to enter 
Sebastopol and leave again 
under three days — but as it 
was, we were at liberty to go 
and come when and where we 
pleased. Every body in Con- 
stantinople warned us to be 
very careful about our pass- 
ports, see that they were strict- 
ly en regie, and never to mislay them for a moment : and they 
told us of numerous instances of Englishmen and others who 
were delayed days, weeks, and even months, in Sebastopol, on 
account of trifling informalities in their passports, and for 
which they were not to blame. I had lost my passport, and 
was traveling under my room-mate's, who stayed behind in 
Constantinople to await our return. To read the description 
of him in that passport and then look at me, any man could 
see that I was no more like him than I am like Hercules. So 
I went into the harbor of Sebastopol with fear and trembling — 
full of a vague, horrible apprehension that I was going to be 
found out and hanged. But all that time my true passport 




FAR-AWAY MOSES. 



MELANCHOLY SEBASTOPOL. 388 

had been floating gallantly overhead — and behold it was only 
our flag. They never asked us for any other. 

We have had a great many Russian and English gentlemen 
and ladies on board to-day, and the time has passed cheerfully 
away. They were all happy-spirited people, and I never 
heard our mother tongue sound so pleasantly as it did when it 
fell from those English lips in this far-off land. I talked to 
the Russians a good deal, just to be friendly, and they talked 
to me from the same motive ; I am sure that both enjoyed the 
conversation, but never a word of it either of us understood. 
I did most of my talking to those English people though, and 
I am sorry we can not carry some of them along with us. 

We have gone whithersoever we chose, to-day, and have met 
with nothing but the kindest attentions. Nobody inquired 
whether we had any passports or not. 

Several of the officers of the Government have suggested 
that we take the ship to a little watering-place thirty miles 
from here, and pay the Emperor of Russia a visit. He is rus- 
ticating there. These officers said they would take it upon 
themselves to insure us a cordial reception. They said if we 
would go, they would not only telegraph the Emperor, but 
send a special courier overland to announce our coming. Our 
time is so short, though, and more especially our coal is so 
nearly out, that we judged it best to forego the rare pleasure 
of holding social intercourse with an Emperor. 

Ruined Pompeii is in good condition compared to Sebasto- 
pol. Here, you may look in whatsoever direction you please, 
and your eye encounters scarcely any thing but ruin, ruin, ru- 
in ! — fragments of houses, crumbled walls, torn and ragged hills, 
devastation every where ! It is as if a mighty earthquake had 
spent all its terrible forces upon this one little spot. Eor 
eighteen long months the storms of war beat upon the helpless 
town, and left it at last the saddest wreck that ever the sun 
has looked upon. Not one solitary house escaped unscathed — 
not one remained habitable, even. Such utter and complete 
ruin one could hardly conceive of. The houses had all been 
solid, dressed stone structures ; most of them were ploughed 



384 DESPERATE FIGHTING. 

through and through by cannon balls — unroofed and sliced 
down from eaves to foundation — and now a row of them, half 
a mile long, looks merely like an endless procession of battered 
chimneys. No semblance of a house remains in such as 
these. Some of the larger buildings had corners knocked off; 
pillars cut in two ; cornices smashed ; holes driven straight 
through the walls. Many of these holes are as round and as 
cleanly cut as if they had been made with an auger. Others 
are half pierced through, and .the clean impression is there 
in the rock, as smooth and as shapely as if it were done in 
putty. Here and there a ball still sticks in a wall, and from it 
iron tears trickle down and discolor the stone. 

The battle-fields were pretty close together. The Malakoff 
tower is on a hill which is right in the edge of the town. The 
Redan was within rifle-shot of the Malakoff; Inkerman was a 
mile away ; and Balaklava removed but an hour's ride. The 
French trenches, by which they approached and invested the 
Malakoff were carried so close under its sloping sides that 
one might have stood by the Russian guns and tossed a stone 
into them. Repeatedly, during three terrible days, they 
swarmed up the little Malakoff hill, and were beaten back 
with terrible slaughter. Finally, they captured the place, and 
drove the Russians out, who then tried to retreat into the town, 
but the English had taken the Redan, and shut them off with 
a wall of flame ; there was nothing for them to do but go back 
and retake the Malakoff or die under its guns. They did go 
back ; they took the Malakoff and retook it two or three times, 
but their desperate valor could not avail, and they had to give 
up at last. 

These fearful fields, where such tempests of death used to 
rage, are peaceful enough now ; no sound is heard, hardly a 
living thing moves about them, they are lonely and silent — 
their desolation is complete. 

There was nothing else to do, and so every body went to 
hunting relics. They have stocked the ship with them. They 
brought them from the Malakoff, from the Redan, Inkerman, 
Balaklava — every where, They have brought cannon balls, 



DESPERATE FIGHTING. 385 

broken ramrods, fragments of shell — iron enough to freight a 
sloop. Some have even brought bones — brought them labori- 
ously from great distances, and were grieved to hear the sur- 
geon pronounce them only bones of mules and oxen. I knew 
Blucher would not lose an opportunity like this. He brought 
a sack full on board and was going for another. I prevailed 
upon him not to go. He has already turned his state-room 
into a museum of worthless trumpery, which he has gathered 
up in his travels. He is labeling his trophies, now. I picked 
up one a while ago, and found it marked " Fragment of a Rus- 
sian General." I carried it out to get a better light upon it — ■ 
it was nothing but a couple of teeth and part of the jaw-bone 
of a horse. I said with some asperity : 

" Fragment of a Russian General ! This 
is absurd. Are you never going to learn 
any sense ?" 

He only said : " Go slow — the old woman 
won't know any different." [His aunt.] 

This person gathers mementoes with a ± fragment. 
perfect recklessness, now-a-days; mixes 
them all up together, and then serenely labels them without 
any regard to truth, propriety, or even plausibility. I have 
found him breaking a stone in two, and labeling half of it 
" Chunk busted from the pulpit of Demosthenes," and the 
other half " Darnick from the Tomb of Abelard and Heloise." 
I have known him to gather up a handful of pebbles by the 
roadside, and bring them on board ship and label them as com- 
ing from twenty celebrated localities five hundred miles apart. 
I remonstrate against these outrages upon reason and truth, of 
course, but it does no good. I get the same tranquil, unan- 
swerable reply every time : 

" It don't signify — the old woman won't know any different." 

Ever since we three or four fortunate ones made the mid- 
night trip to Athens, it has afforded him genuine satisfaction 
to give every body in the ship a pebble from the Mars-hill 
where St. Paul preached. He got all those pebbles on the sea- 
shore, abreast the ship, but professes to have gathered them 

25 




386 



DESPERATE FIGHTING 



from one of our party. However, it is not of any use for me 
to expose the deception — it affords him pleasure, and does no 
harm to any body. He says he never expects to run out of 
mementoes of St. Paul as long as he is in reach of a sand- 
bank. Well, he is no worse than others. I notice that all 
travelers supply deficiencies in their collections in the same 
way. I shall never have any confidence in such things again 
while I live. 




OHAPTEE XXXYI. 

~TTT~E have got so far east, now — a hundred and fifty-five 
* V degrees of longitude from San Francisco — that my 
watch can not " keep the hang " of the time any more. It has 
grown discouraged, and stopped. I think it did a wise thing. 
The difference in time between Sebastopol and the Pacific 
coast is enormous. When it is six o'clock in the morning here, 
it is somewhere about week before last in California. "We are 
excusable for getting a little tangled as to time. These dis- 
tractions and distresses about the time have worried me so 
much that I was afraid my mind was so much affected that I 
never would have any appreciation of time again ; but when 
I noticed how handy I was yet about comprehending when it 
was dinner-time, a blessed tranquillity settled down upon me, 
and I am tortured with doubts and fears no more. 

Odessa is about twenty hours' run from Sebastopol, and is the 
most northerly port in the Black Sea. We came here to get coal, 
principally. The city has a population of one hundred and 
thirty-three thousand, and is growing faster than any other 
small city out of America. It is a free port, and is the great 
grain mart of this particular part of the world. Its roadstead 
is full of ships. Engineers are at work, now, turning the open 
roadstead into a spacious artificial harbor. It is to be almost 
inclosed by massive stone piers, one of which will extend into 
the sea over three thousand feet in a straight line. 

I have not felt so much at home for a long time as I did when I 
" raised the hill " and stood in Odessa for the first time. It 
looked just like an American city ; fine, broad streets, and 



388 IMITATION AMERICAN" TOWN. 

straight as well ; low houses, (two or three stories,) wide, neat, 
and free from any quaintness of architectural ornamentation ; 
locust trees bordering the sidewalks (they call them acacias ;) 
a stirring, business-look about the streets and the stores ; fast 
walkers; a familiar new look about the houses and every 
thing ; yea, and a driving and smothering cloud of dust that 
was so like a message from our own dear native land that we 
could hardly refrain from shedding a few grateful tears and 
execrations in the old time-honored American way. Look up 
the street or down the street, this way or that way, we saw 
only America ! There was not one thing to remind us that we 
were in Russia. We walked for some little distance, reveling 
in thic home vision, and then we came upon a church and a 
hack-driver, and presto ! the illusion vanished ! The church 
had a slender-spired dome that rounded inward at its base, and 
looked like a turnip turned upside down, and the hackman 
seemed to be dressed in a long petticoat without any hoops. 
These things were essentially foreign, and so were the carriages 
■ — but every body knows about these things, and there is no 
occasion for my describing them. 

We were only to stay here a day and a night and take in coal ; 
we consulted the guide-books and were rejoiced to know that 
there were no sights in Odessa to see ; and so we had one good, 
untrammeled holyday on our hands, with nothing to do but 
idle about the city and enjoy ourselves. We sauntered through 
the markets and criticised the fearful and wonderful costumes 
from the back country ; examined the populace as far as eyes 
could do it ; and closed the entertainment with an ice-cream 
debauch. We do not get ice-cream every where, and so, when 
we do, we are apt to dissipate to excess. We never cared any 
thing about ice-cream at home, but we look upon it with a sort 
of idolatry now that it is so scarce in these red-hot climates of 
the East. 

We only found two pieces of statuary, and this was another 
blessing. One was a bronze image of the Due de Richelieu, 
grand-nephew of the splendid Cardinal. It stood in a spacious, 
handsome promenade, overlooking the sea, and from its base a 



PUBLIC INGRATITUDE. 389 

vast flight of stone steps led down to the harbor — two hundred 
of them, fifty feet long, and a wide landing at the bottom of 
every twenty. It is a noble staircase, and from a distance the 
people toiling up it looked like insects. I mention this statue 
and this stairway because they have their story. Richelieu 
founded Odessa — watched over it with paternal care — labored 
with a fertile brain and a wise understanding for its best inter- 
ests — spent his fortune freely to the same end — endowed it 
with a sound prosperity, and one which will yet make it one 
of the great cities of the Old World — built this noble stairway 

with money from his own private purse — and . Well, the 

people for whom he had done so much, let him walk down 
these same steps, one day, unattended, old, poor, without a 
second coat to his back ; and when, years afterwards, he died 
in Sebastopol in poverty and neglect, they called a meeting, 
subscribed liberally, and immediately erected this tasteful 
monument to his memory, and named a great street after him. 
It reminds me of what Robert Burns' mother said when they 
erected a stately monument to his memory : " Ah, Robbie, ye 
asked them for bread and they hae gi'en ye a stane." 

The people of Odessa have warmly recommended us to go 
and call on the Emperor, as did the Sebastopolians. They 
have telegraphed his Majesty, and he has signified his willing- 
ness to grant us an audience. So we are getting up the an- 
chors and preparing to sail to his watering-place. What a 
scratching around there will be, now ! what a holding of im- 
portant meetings and appointing of solemn committees ! — and 
what a furbishing up of claw-hammer coats and white silk 
neck-ties ! As this fearful ordeal we are about to pass through 
pictures itself to my fancy in all its dread sublimity, I begin 
to feel my fierce desire to converse with a genuine Emperor 
cooling down and passing away. What am I to do with my 
hands ? What am I to do with my feet 1 What in the world 
am I to do with myself % 



CHAPTEE XXZYII. 

'TT7"E anchored here at Yalta, Kussia, two or three days 
▼ V ago. To me the place was a vision of the Sierras. 
The tall, gray mountains that back it, their sides bristling with 
pines — cloven with ravines — here and there a hoary rock tow- 
ering into view — long, straight streaks sweeping down from 
the summit to the sea, marking the passage of some avalanche 
of former times — all these were as like what one sees in the 
Sierras as if the one were a portrait of the other. The little 
village of Yalta nestles at the foot of an amphitheatre which 
slopes backward and upward to the wall of hills, and looks as 
if it might have sunk quietly down to its present position from 
a higher elevation. This depression is covered with the great 
parks and gardens of noblemen, and through the mass of green 
foliage the bright colors of their palaces bud out here and there 
like flowers. It is a beautiful spot. 

We had the United States Consul on board — the Odessa 
Consul. We assembled in the cabin and commanded him to 
tell us what we must do to be saved, and tell us quickly. He 
made a speech. The first thing he said fell like a blight on 
every hopeful spirit : he had never seen a court reception. 
(Three groans for the Consul.) But he said he had seen recep- 
tions at the Governor-General's in Odessa, and had often list- 
ened to people's experiences of receptions at the Russian and 
other courts, and believed he knew very well what sort of 
ordeal we were about to essay. (Hope budded again.) He 
said we were many ; the summer-palace was small — a mere 



PRACTICING FOR THE ORDEAL. 391 

mansion ; doubtless we should be received in summer fashion 
— in the garden ; we would stand in a row, all the gentlemen 
in swallow-tail coats, white kids, and white neck-ties, and the 
ladies in light-colored silks, or something of that kind ; at the 
proper moment — 12 meridian — the Emperor, attended by his 
suite arrayed in splendid uniforms, would appear and walk 
slowly along the line, bowing to some, and saying two or three 
words to others. At the moment his Majesty appeared, a uni- 
versal, delighted, enthusiastic smile ought to break out like a 
rash among the passengers — a smile of love, of gratification, 
of admiration — and with one accord, the party must begin to 
bow — not obsequiously, but respectfully, and with dignity ; at 
the end of fifteen minutes the Emperor would go in the house, 
and we could run along home again. "We felt immensely re- 
lieved. It seemed, in a manner, easy. There was not a man 
in the party but believed that with a little practice he could 
stand in a row, especially if there were others along ; there 
was not a man but believed he could bow without tripping on 
his coat tail and breaking his neck ; in a word, we came to 
believe we were equal to any item in the performance except 
that complicated smile. The Consul also said we ought to 
draft a little address to the Emperor, and present it to one of 
his aides-de-camp, who would forward it to him at the proper 
time. Therefore, five gentlemen were appointed to prepare 
the document, and the fifty others went sadly smiling about 
the ship — practicing. During the next twelve hours we had 
the general appearance, somehow, of being at a funeral, where 
every body was sorry the death had occurred, but glad it 
was over — where every body was smiling, and yet broken- 
hearted. 

A committee went ashore to wait on his Excellency the Gov- 
ernor-General, and learn our fate. At the end of three hours 
of boding suspense, they came back and said the Emperor 
would receive us at noon the next day — would send carriages 
for us — would hear the address in person. The Grand Duke 
Michael had sent to invite us to his palace also. Any man 
could see that there was an intention here to show that Bussia's 



392 



RECEIVED BY THE EMPEROR. 



friendship for America was so genuine as to render even her 
private citizens objects worthy of kindly attentions. 

At the appointed hour we drove out three miles, and assem- 
bled in the handsome garden in front of the Emperor's palace. 




YALTA, FROM THE EMPEROR'S PALACE. 



We formed a circle under the trees before the door, for there 
was no one room in the house able to accommodate our three- 
score persons comfortably, and in a few minutes the imperial 
family came out bowing and smiling, and stood in our midst. 
A number of great dignitaries of the Empire, in undress uni- 
forms, came with them. "With every bow, his Majesty said a 
word of welcome. I copy these speeches. There is character 
in them — Russian character — which is politeness itself, and the 
genuine article. The French are polite, but it is often mere 
ceremonious politeness, A Russian imbues his polite things 
with a heartiness, both of phrase and expression, that compels 



RECEIVED BY THE EMPEROR, 



393 



belief in their sincerity. As I was saying, the Czar punctu- 
ated his speeches with bows : 

" Good morning — I am glad to see you — I am gratified — I 
am delighted — I am happy to receive you !" 

All took off their hats, and the Consul inflicted the address 
on him. He bore it with unflinching fortitude ; then took the 
rusty-looking document and handed it to some great officer or 
other, to be filed away 
among the archives of 
Russia — in the stove. He 
thanked us for the ad- 
dress, and said he was 
very much pleased to see 
us, especially as such 
friendly relations existed 
between Russia and the 
United States. The Em- 
press said the Americans 
were favorites in Russia, 
and she hoped the Rus- 
sians were similarly re- 
garded in America. 
These were all the speech- 
es that were made, and I 

recommend them to parties who present policemen with gold 
watches, as models of brevity and point. After this the Em- 
press went and talked sociably (for an Empress) with various 
ladies around the circle ; several gentlemen entered into a dis- 
jointed general conversation with the Emperor ; the Dukes 
and Princes, Admirals and Maids of Honor dropped into free- 
and-easy chat with first one and then another of our party, and 
whoever chose stepped forward and spoke with the modest 
little Grand Duchess Marie, the Czar's daughter. She is four- 
teen years old, light-haired, blue-eyed, unassuming and pretty. 
Every body talks English. 

The Emperor wore a cap, frock coat and pantaloons, all of 
some kind of plain white drilling — cotton or linen — and sport- 




EMPEROR OF RUSSIA. 



394 CONCENTRATED POWER. 

ed no jewelry or any insignia whatever of rank. No costume 
could be less ostentatious. He is very tall and spare, and a 
determined-looking man, though a very pleasant-looking one, 
nevertheless. It is easy to see that he is kind and affectionate. 
There is something very noble in his expression when his cap 
is off. There is none of that cunning in his eye that all of us 
noticed in Louis Napoleon's. 

The Empress and the little Grand Duchess wore simple suits 
of foulard (or foulard silk, I don't know which is proper,) with 
a small blue spot in it ; the dresses were trimmed with blue ; 
both ladies wore broad blue sashes about their waists ; linen 
collars and clerical ties of muslin ; low-crowned straw-hats 
trimmed with blue velvet ; parasols and flesh-colored gloves. 
The Grand Duchess had no heels on her shoes. I do not know 
this of my own knowledge, but one of our ladies told me so. 
I was not looking at her shoes. I was glad to observe that she 
wore her own hair, plaited in thick braids against the back of 
her head, instead of the uncomely thing they call a waterfall, 
which is about as much like a waterfall as a canvas-covered 
ham is like a cataract. Taking the kind expression that is in 
the Emperor's face and the gentleness that is in his young 
daughter's into consideration, I wondered if it would not tax 
the Czar's firmness to the utmost to condemn a supplicating 
wretch to misery in the wastes of Siberia if she pleaded for 
him. Every time their eyes met, I saw more and more what 
a tremendous power that weak, diffident school-girl could 
wield if she chose to do it. Many and many a time she might 
rule the Autocrat of Russia, whose lightest word is law to sev- 
enty millions of human beings ! She was only a girl, and she 
looked like a thousand others I have seen, but never a girl 
provoked such a novel and peculiar interest in me before. A 
strange, new sensation is a rare thing in this hum-drum life, 
and I had it here. There was nothing stale or worn out about 
the thoughts and feelings the situation and the circumstances 
created. It seemed strange — stranger than I can tell — to 
think that the central figure in the cluster of men and women, 
chatting here under the trees like the most ordinary individual 



AT THE CROWN PRINCESS. 395 

in the land, was a man who could open his lips and ships 
would fly through the waves, locomotives would speed over the 
plains, couriers would hurry from village to village, a hundred 
telegraphs would flash the word to the four corners of an Em- 
pire that stretches its vast proportions over a seventh part of 
the habitable globe, and a countless multitude of men would 
spring to do his bidding. I had a sort of vague desire to ex- 
amine his hands and see if they were of flesh and blood, like 
other men's. Here was a man who could do this wonderful 
thing, and yet if I chose I could knock him down. The case 
was plain, but it seemed preposterous, nevertheless — as prepos- 
terous as trying to knock down a mountain or wipe out a con- 
tinent. If this man sprained his ankle, a million miles of 
telegraph would carry the news over mountains — valleys — 
uninhabited deserts — under the trackless sea — and ten thousand 
newspapers would prate of it ; if he were grievously ill, all 
the nations would know it before the sun rose again ; if he 
dropped lifeless where he stood, his fall might shake the 
thrones of half a world ! If I could have stolen his coat, I 
would have done it. When I meet a man like that, I want 
something to remember him by. 

As a general thing, we have been shown through palaces by 
some plush-legged filagreed flunkey or other, who charged a 
franc for it ; but after talking with the company half an hour, 
the Emperor of Russia and his family conducted us all through 
their mansion themselves. They made no charge. They 
seemed to take a real pleasure in it. 

We spent half an hour idling through the palace, admiring 
the cosy apartments and the rich but eminently home-like 
appointments of the place, and then the Imperial family bade 
our party a kind good-bye, and proceeded to count the spoons. 

An invitation was extended to us to visit the palace of the 
eldest son, the Crown Prince of Russia, which was near at 
hand. The young man was absent, but the Dukes and Coun- 
tesses and Princes went over the premises with us as leisurely 
as was the case at the Emperor's, and conversation continued 
as lively as ever. 



396 AT THE GRAND DUKE'S. 

It was a little after one o'clock, now. We drove to the 
Grand Duke Michael's, a mile away, in response to his invita- 
tion, previously given. 

We arrived in twenty minutes from the Emperor's. It is a 
lovely place. The beautiful palace nestles among the grand 
old groves of the park, the park sits in the lap of the pictu- 
resque crags and hills, and both look out upon the breezy 
ocean. In the park are rustic seats, here and there, in se- 
cluded nooks that are dark with shade ; there are rivulets of 
crystal water ; there are lakelets, with inviting, grassy banks ; 
there are glimpses of sparkling cascades through openings in 
the wilderness of foliage; there are streams of clear water 
gushing from mimic knots on the trunks of forest trees ; there 
are miniature marble temples perched upon gray old crags ; 
there are airy lookouts whence one may gaze upon a broad 
expanse of landscape and ocean. The palace is modeled after 
the choicest forms of Grecian architecture, and its wide colon- 
nades surround a central court that is banked with rare 
flowers that fill the place with their fragrance, and in their 
midst springs a fountain that cools the summer air, and may 
possibly breed mosquitoes, but I do not think it does. 

The Grand Duke and his Duchess came out, and the pre- 
sentation ceremonies were as simple as they had been at the 
Emperor's. In a few minutes, conversation was under way, as 
before. The Empress appeared in the verandah, and the little 
Grand Duchess came out into the crowd. They had beaten 
us there. In a few minutes, the Emperor came himself on 
horseback. It was very pleasant. You can appreciate it if 
you have ever visited royalty and felt occasionally that pos- 
sibly you might be wearing out your welcome — though as a 
general thing, I believe, royalty is not scrupulous about dis- 
charging you when it is done with you. 

The Grand Duke is the third brother of the Emperor, is 
about thirty-seven years old, perhaps, and is the princeliest 
figure in Russia. He is even taller than the Czar, as straight 
as an Indian, and bears himself like one of those gorgeous 
knights we read about in romances of the Crusades. He looks 



AT THE GRAND DUKE'S. 397 

like a great-hearted fellow who would pitch an enemy into the 
river in a moment, and then jump in and risk his life fishing 
him out again. The stories they tell of him show him to be 
of a brave and generous nature. He must have been desirous 
of proving that Americans were welcome guests in the imperial 
palaces of Russia, because he rode all the way to Yalta and 
escorted our procession to the Emperor's himself, and kept his 
aids scurrying about, clearing the road and offering assistance 
wherever it could be needed. We were rather familiar with 
him then, because we did not know who he was. We recog- 
nized him now, and appreciated the friendly spirit that 
prompted him to do us a favor that any other Grand Duke in 
the world would have doubtless declined to do. He had plenty 
of servitors whom he could have sent, but he chose to attend 
to the matter himself. 

The Grand Duke was dressed in the handsome and showy 
uniform of a Cossack officer. The Grand Duchess had on a 
white alpaca robe, with the seams and gores trimmed with 
black barb lace, and a little gray hat with a feather of the same 
color. She is young, rather pretty modest and unpretending, 
and full of winning politeness. 

Our party walked all through the house, and then the nobil- 
ity escorted them all over the grounds, and finally brought 
them back to the palace about half-past two o'clock to break- 
fast. They called it breakfast, but we would have called it 
luncheon. It consisted of two kinds of wine ; tea, bread, 
cheese, and cold meats, and was served on the centre-tables in 
the reception room and the verandahs — anywhere that was 
convenient ; there was no ceremony. It was a sort of picnic. 
I had heard before that we were to breakfast there, but Blucher 
said he believed Baker's boy had suggested it to his Imperial 
Highness. I think not — though it would be like him. Baker's 
boy is the famine-breeder of the ship. He is always hungry. 
They say he goes about the state-rooms when the passengers 
are out, and eats up all the soap. And they say he eats 
oakum. They say he will eat any thing he can get between 
meals, but he prefers oakum. He does not like oakum for 



398 THEATRICAL MONARCHS EXPOSED. 

dinner, but he likes it for a lunch, at odd hours, or any thing 
that way. It makes him very disagreeable, because it makes 
his breath bad, and keeps his teeth all stuck up with tar. 
Baker's boy may have suggested the breakfast, but I hope he 
did not. It went off well, anyhow. The illustrious host 
moved about from place to place, and helped to destroy the; 
provisions and keep the conversation lively, and the Grand 
Duchess talked with the verandah parties and such as had sat- 
isfied their appetites and straggled out from the reception 
room. 

The Grand Duke's tea was delicious. They give one a lemon 
to squeeze into it, or iced milk, if he prefers it. The former is 
best. This tea is brought overland from China. It injures 
the article to transport it by sea. 

When it was time to go, we bade our distinguished hosts 
good-bye, and they retired happy and contented to their apart- 
ments to count their spoons. 

We had spent the best part of half a day in the home of 
royalty, and had been as cheerful and comfortable all the time 
as we could have been in the ship. I would as soon have 
thought of being cheerful in Abraham's bosom as in the palace 
of an Emperor. I supposed that Emperors were terrible peo- 
ple. I thought they never did any thing but wear magnificent 
crowns and red velvet dressing-gowns with dabs of wool sewed 
on them in spots, and sit on thrones and scowl at the flunkies 
and the people in the parquette, and order Dukes and Duch- 
esses off to execution. I find, however, that when one is so 
fortunate as to get behind the scenes and see them at home 
and in the privacy of their firesides, they are strangely like 
common mortals. They are pleasanter to look upon then than 
they are in their theatrical aspect. It seems to come as nat- 
ural to them to dress and act like other people as it is to put 
a friend's cedar pencil in your pocket when you are done using 
it. But I can never have any confidence in the tinsel kings of 
the theatre after this. It will be a great loss. I used to take 
such a thrilling pleasure in them. But, hereafter, I will turn 
me sadly away and say ; 



THEATKICAL MONARCHS EXPOSED. 



399 



u This does not answer — this isn't the style of king that I 
am acquainted with." 

When they swagger around the stage in jeweled crowns and 
splendid 
robes, I 
shall feel 
bound to 
observe 
that all the 
E m p e rors 
that ever / 
was per- 
sonally ac- 
quainted 
with wore 
the com- 
monest sort 
of clothes, 
and did not 
swagger. 
And when 
they come 
on the stage 
a 1 1 e n d ed 
by a vast 
body-guard 
of supes in 
helmets 

and tin breastplates, it will be my duty as well as my pleasure 
to inform the ignorant that no crowned head of my acquaint- 
ance has a soldier any where about his house or his person. 

Possibly it may be thought that our party tarried too long, 
or did other improper things, but such was not the case. The 
company felt that they were occupying an unusually respon- 
sible position — they were representing the people of America, 
not the Government — and therefore they were careful to do 
their best to perform their high mission with credit. 

On the other hand, the Imperial families, no doubt, consid- 




TINSEL KING. 



400 SAVED AS BY FIRE. 

ered that in entertaining us they were more especially enter- 
taining the people of America than they could by showering 
attentions on a whole platoon of ministers plenipotentiary ; 
and therefore they gave to the event its fullest significance, as 
an expression of good will and friendly feeling toward the en- 
tire country. "We took the kindnesses we received as atten- 
tions thus directed, of course, and not to ourselves as a party. 
That we felt a personal pride in being received as the repre- 
sentatives of a nation, we do not deny ; that we felt a national 
pride in the warm cordiality of that reception, can not be 
doubted. 

Our poet has been rigidly suppressed, from the time we let 
go the anchor. When it was announced that we were going 
to visit +he Emperor of Russia, the fountains of his great deep 
were broken up, and he rained ineffable bosh for four-and- 
twenty hours. Our original anxiety as to what we were going 
to do with ourselves, was suddenly transformed into anxiety 
about what we were going to do with our poet. The problem 
was solved at last. Two alternatives were offered him — he 
must either swear a dreadful oath that he would not issue a 
line of his poetry while he was in the Czar's dominions, or else 
remain under guard on board the ship until we were safe at 
Constantinople again. He fought the dilemma long, but yielded 
at last. It was a great deliverance. Perhaps the savage 
reader would like a specimen of his style. I do not mean this 
term to be offensive. I only use it because " the gentle reader " 
has been used so often that any change from it can not but be 
refreshing : 

"Save us and sanctify us, and finally, then, 
See good provisions we enjoy while we journey to Jerusalem. 
For so man proposes, which it is most true, 
And time will wait for none, nor for us too." 

The sea has been unusually rough all day. However, we 
have had a lively time of it, anyhow. We have had quite a 
run of visitors. The Governor-General came, and we received 
him with a salute of nine guns. He brought his family with 
him. I observed that carpets were spread from the pier-head 



ARISTOCRATIC VISITORS. 401 

to his carriage for him to walk on, though I have seen him 
walk there without any carpet when he was not on business. 
I thought may be he had what the accidental insurance people 
might call an extra-hazardous polish ("policy" — joke, but not 
above mediocrity,) on his boots, and wished to protect them, 
but- 1 examined and could not see that they were blacked any 
better than usual. It may have been that he had forgotten his 
carpet, before, but he did not have it with him, anyhow. He 
was an exceedingly pleasant old gentleman ; we all liked him, 
especially Blucher. When he went away, Blucher invited him 
to come again and fetch his carpet along. 

Prince Dolgorouki and a Grand Admiral or two, whom we 
had seen yesterday at the reception, came on board also. I 
was a little distant with these parties, at first, because when I 
have been visiting Emperors I do not like to be too familiar 
with people I only know by reputation, and whose moral char- 
acters and standing in society I can not be thoroughly ac- 
quainted with. I judged it best to be a little offish, at first. 
I said to myself, Princes and Counts and Grand Admirals are 
very well, but they are not Emperors, and one can not be too 
particular about who he associates with. 

Baron Wrangel came, also. He used to be Russian Ambas- 
sador at Washington. I told him I had an uncle who fell 
down a shaft and broke himself in two, as much as a year be- 
fore that. That was a falsehood, but then I was not going to 
let any man eclipse me on surprising adventures, merely for 
the want of a little invention. The Baron is a fine man, and 
is said to stand high in the Emperor's confidence and esteem. 

Baron Ungem-Sternberg, a boisterous, whole-souled old no- 
bleman, came with the rest. He is a man of progress and 
enterprise — a representative man of the age. He is the Chief 
Director of the railway system of Russia — a sort of railroad 
king. In his line he is making things move along in this coun- 
try. He has traveled extensively in America. He says he has 
tried convict labor on his railroads, and with perfect success. 
He says the convicts work well, and are quiet and peaceable. 
He observed that he employs nearly ten thousand of them now. 

26 



402 ARISTOCRATIC VISITORS. 

This appeared to be another call on my resources. I was equal 
to the emergency. I said we had eighty thousand convicts 
employed on the railways in America — all of them under sen- 
tence of death for murder in the first degree. That closed 
him out. 

"We had General Todtleben (the famous defender of Sebas- 
topol, during the siege,) and many inferior army and also navy 
officers, and a number of unofficial Russian ladies and gentle- 
men. Naturally, a champagne luncheon was in order, and 
was accomplished without loss of life. Toasts and jokes were 
discharged freely, but no speeches were made save one thank- 
ing the Emperor and the Grand Duke, through the Governor- 
General, for our hospitable reception, and one by the Gov- 
ernor-General in reply, in which he returned the Emperor's 
thanks for the speech, etc., etc. 



CHAPTEE XXXYIII. 



"TTT"E returned to Constantinople, and after a day or two 

▼ ▼ spent in exhausting marches about the city and voyages 
up the Golden Horn in caiques, we steamed away again. "We 
passed through the Sea of Marmora and the Dardanelles, and 
steered for a new land — a new one to us, at least — Asia. We 
had as yet only acquired a bowing acquaintance with it, 
through pleasure excursions to Scutari and the regions round 
about. 

"We passed between Lemnos and Mytilene, and saw them as 
we had seen Elba and the Balearic Isles — mere bulky shapes, 
with the softening mists of distance upon them — whales in a 
fog, as it were. Then we held our course southward, and 
began to " read up " celebrated Smyrna. 

At all hours of the day and night the sailors in the forecastle 
amused themselves and aggravated us by burlesquing our visit 
to royalty. The opening paragraph of our Address to the 
Emperor was framed as follows : 

""We are a handful of private citizens of America, traveling 
simply for recreation — and unostentatiously, as becomes our 
unofficial state — and, therefore, we have no excuse to 
tender for presenting ourselves before your Majesty, save 
the desire of offering our grateful acknowledgments to the 
lord of a realm, which, through good and through evil 
report, has been the steadfast friend of the land we love so 
well." 

The third cook, crowned with a resplendent tin basin and 



404 



SAILOR BURLESQUES 



wrapped royally in a table-cloth mottled with grease-spots and 
coffee stains, and bearing a sceptre that looked strangely like a 
belay ing-pin, walked npon a dilapidated carpet and perched 
himself on the capstan, careless of the flying spray ; his tarred 
and weather-beaten Chamberlains, Dukes and Lord High Ad- 
mirals surrounded him, arrayed in all the pomp that spare 
tarpaulins and remnants of old sails could furnish. Then the 
visiting " watch below," transformed into graceless ladies and 

uncouth pilgrims, by 
' rude travesties upon 
waterfalls, hoopskirts, 
white kid gloves and 
swallow-tail coats, mov- 
ed solemnly up the 
companion way, and 
bowing low, began a 
system of complicated 
and extraordinary smil- 
ing which few monarchs 
could look upon and 
live. Then the mock 
consul, a slush-plastered 
deck-sweep, drew out a 
soiled fragment of paper 
and proceeded to read, 
laboriously 

" To His Imperial 

Majesty, Alexander II., 

Emperor of Russia : 

" We are a handful of private citizens of America, traveling 

simply for recreation, — and unostentatiously, as becomes our 

unofficial state — and therefore, we have no excuse to tender for 

presenting ourselves before your Majesty — " 

The Emperor — " Then what the devil did you come for ?" 
— " Save the desire of offering our grateful acknowledgments 
to the lord of a realm which — " 

The Emperor — " Oh, d — n the Address! — read it to the 




SHIP EMPEROR. 



SAILOR BURLESQUES. 



405 



police. Chamberlain, take these people over to my brother, 
the Grand Duke's, and give them a square meal. Adieu ! I 
happy — I am gratified — I am delighted — I am bored. 



am 



Adieu, adieu — vamos the ranch! The First Groom of the 
Palace will proceed to count the portable articles of value 
belonging to the premises." 

The farce then closed, to be repeated again with every 




THE RECEPTION. 



change of the watches, and embellished with new and still more 
extravagant inventions of pomp and conversation. 

At all times of the day and night the phraseology of that 
tiresome address fell upon our ears. Grimy sailors came down 
out of the foretop placidly announcing themselves as " a hand- 
ful of private citizens of America, traveling simply for recreation 
and unostentatiously," etc. ; the coal passers moved to their 
duties in the profound depths of the ship, explaining the 
blackness of their faces and their uncouthness of dress, with 
the reminder that they were " a handful of private citizens, 
traveling simply for recreation," etc., and when the cry rang 
through the vessel at midnight : " Eight bells ! — larboard 
watch, turn out !" the larboard watch came gaping and 
stretching out of their den, with the everlasting formula : " Aye- 



406 SMYRNA. 

aye, sir! We are a handful of private citizens of America, 
traveling simply for recreation, and unostentatiously, as be- 
comes our unofficial state !" 

As I was a member of the committee, and helped to frame 
the Address, these sarcasms came home to me. I never heard 
a sailor proclaiming himself as a handful of American citizens 
traveling for recreation, but I wished he might trip and fall 
overboard, and so reduce his handful by one individual, at 
least. I never was so tired of any one phrase as the sailors 
made me of the opening sentence of the Address to the Em- 
peror of Russia. 

This seaport of Smyrna, our first notable acquaintance in 
Asia, is a closely packed city of one hundred and thirty thou- 
sand inhabitants, and, like Constantinople, it has no outskirts. 
It is as closely packed at its outer edges as it is in the centre, 
and then the habitations leave suddenly off and the plain be- 
yond seems houseless. It is just like any other Oriental city. 
That is to say, its Moslem houses are heavy and dark, and as 
comfortless as so many tombs ; its streets are crooked, rudely 
and roughly paved, and as narrow as an ordinary staircase ; 
the streets uniformly carry a man to any other place than the 
one he wants to go to, and surprise him by landing him in the 
most unexpected localities ; business is chiefly carried on in 
great covered bazaars, celled like a honeycomb with innumer- 
able shops no larger than a common closet, and the whole hive 
cut up into a maze of alleys about wide enough to accommo- 
date a laden camel, and well calculated to confuse a stranger 
and eventually lose him ; every where there is dirt, every where 
there are fleas, every where there are lean, broken-hearted 
dogs ; every alley is thronged with people ; wherever you look, 
your eye rests upon a wild masquerade of extravagant cos- 
tumes ; the workshops are all open to the streets, and the 
workmen visible ; all manner of sounds assail the ear, and over 
them all rings out the muezzin's cry from some tall minaret, 
calling the faithful vagabonds to prayer ; and superior to the 
call to prayer, the noises in the streets, the interest of the cos- 
tumes — superior to every thing, and claiming the bulk of at' 



MORE "ORIENTAL SPLENDOR." 407 

tention first, last, and all the time — is a combination of Moham- 
medan stenches, to which the smell of even a Chinese quarter 
would be as pleasant as the roasting odors of the fatted calf to 
the nostrils of the returning Prodigal. Such is Oriental lux- 
ury — such is Oriental splendor ! We read about it all our 
days, but we comprehend it not until we see it. Smyrna is a 
very old city. Its name occurs several times in the Bible, one 
or two of the disciples of Christ visited it, and here was located 
one of the original seven apocalyptic churches spoken of in 
Revelations. These churches were symbolized in the Scrip- 
tures as candlesticks, and on certain conditions there was a 
sort of implied promise that Smyrna should be endowed 
with a " crown of life." She was to "be faithful unto death" 
— those were the terms. She has not kept up her faith 
straight along, but the pilgrims that wander hither con- 
sider that she has come near enough to it to save her, and so 
they point to the fact that Smyrna to-day wears her crown of 
life, and is a great city, with a great commerce and full of en- 
ergy, while the cities wherein were located the other six 
churches, and to which no crown of life was promised, have 
vanished from the earth. So Smyrna really still possesses her 
crown of life, in a business point of view. Her career, for 
eighteen centuries, has been a chequered one, and she has been 
under the rule of princes of many creeds, yet there has been 
no season during all that time, as far as we know, (and during 
such seasons as she was inhabited at all,) that she has been with- 
out her little community of Christians " faithful unto death." 
Hers was the only church against which no threats were im- 
plied in the Revelations, and the only one which survived. 

With Ephesus, forty miles from here, where was located an- 
other of the seven churches, the case was different. The " can- 
dlestick " has been removed from Ephesus. Her light has been 
put out. Pilgrims, always prone to find prophecies in the 
Bible, and often where none exist, speak cheerfully and compla- 
cently of poor, ruined Ephesus as the victim of prophecy. 
And yet there is no sentence that promises, without due quali- 
fication, the destruction of the city. The words are : 



408 PILGRIM PROPHECY-SAVANS. 

11 Remember, therefore, from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first 
works ; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out 
of his place, except thou repent." 

That is all ; the other verses are singularly complimentary to 
Ephesus. The threat is qualified. There is no history to show 
that she did not repent. But the cruelest habit the modern 
prophecy-savans have, is that one of coolly and arbitrarily fit- 
ting the prophetic shirt on to the wrong man. They do it 
without regard to rhyme or reason. Both the cases I have 
just mentioned are instances in point. Those " prophecies " 
are distinctly leveled at the " churches of Ephesus, Smyrna," 
etc., and yet the pilgrims invariably make them refer to the 
cities instead. ]STo crown of life is promised to the town of 
Smyrna and its commerce, but to the handful of Christians 
who formed its " church." If they were "faithful unto death," 
they have their crown now — but no amount of faithfulness and 
legal shrewdness combined could legitimately drag the city into 
a participation in the promises of the prophecy. The stately 
language of the Bible refers to a crown of life whose lustre 
will reflect the day-beams of the endless ages of eternity, not 
the butterfly existence of a city built by men's hands, which 
must pass to dust with the builders and be forgotten even in 
the mere handful of centuries vouchsafed to the solid world 
itself between its cradle and its grave. 

The fashion of delving out fulfillments of prophecy where 
that prophecy consists of mere "ifs," trenches upon the absurd. 
Suppose, a thousand years from now, a malarious swamp 
builds itself up in the shallow harbor of Smyrna, or something 
else kills the town ; and suppose, also, that within that time 
the swamp that has filled the renowned harbor of Ephesus and 
rendered her ancient site deadly and uninhabitable to-day, be- 
comes hard and healthy ground ; suppose the natural conse- 
quence ensues, to wit : that Smyrna becomes a melancholy 
ruin, and Ephesus is rebuilt. "What would the prophecy-savans 
say ? They would coolly skip over our age of the world, and 
say : " Smyrna was not faithful unto death, and so her crown 
©f life was denied her ; Ephesus repented, and lo ! her candle- 



PILGRIM PROPHECY-SAVANS. 409 

stick was not removed. Behold these evidences ! How won- 
derful is prophecy !" 

Smyrna has been utterly destroyed six times. If her crown 
of life had been an insurance policy, she would have had an 
opportunity to collect on it the first time she fell. But she 
holds it on sufferance and by a complimentary construction of 
language which does not refer to her. Six different times, 
however, I suppose some infatuated prophecy-enthusiast blun- 
dered along and said, to the infinite disgust of Smyrna and the 
Smyrniotes : " In sooth, here is astounding fulfillment of 
prophecy ! Smyrna hath not been faithful unto death, and be- 
hold her crown of life is vanished from her head. Yerily, 
these things be astonishing !" 

Smch things have a bad influence. They provoke worldly 
men into using light conversation concerning sacred subjects. 
Thick-headed commentators upon the Bible, and stupid 
preachers and teachers, work more damage to religion than 
sensible, cool-brained clergymen can fight away again, toil as 
they may. It is not good judgment to fit a crown of life upon 
a city which has been destroyed six times. That other class 
of wiseacres who twist prophecy in such a manner as to make 
it promise the destruction and desolation of the same city, use 
judgment just as bad, since the city is in a very flourishing 
condition now, unhappily for them. These things put argu- 
ments into the mouth of infidelity. 

A portion of the city is pretty exclusively Turkish ; the 
Jews have a quarter to themselves ; the Franks another quar- 
ter ; so, also, with the Armenians. The Armenians, of course, 
are Christians. Their houses are large, clean, airy, hand- 
somely paved with black and white squares of marble, and in 
the centre of many of them is a square court, which has in it 
a luxuriant flower-garden and a sparkling fountain ; the doors 
of all the rooms open on this. A very wide hall leads to the 
street door, and in this the women sit, the most of the day. In 
the cool of the evening they dress up in their best raiment and 
show themselves at the door. They are all comely of counte- 
nance, and exceedingly neat and cleanly ; they look as if they 



AJM 



410 SOCIABLE ARMENIAN GIRLS. 

were just out of a band-box. Some of the young ladies — many 
of them, I may say — are even very beautiful ; they average a 
shade better than American girls — which treasonable words I 
pray may be forgiven me. They are very sociable, and will 
smile back when a stranger smiles at them, bow back when he 
bows, and talk back if he speaks to them. ~No introduction is 
required. An hour's chat at the door with a pretty girl one 
never saw before, is easily obtained, and is very pleasant. I 
have tried it. I could not talk anything but English, and the 
girl knew nothing but Greek, or Armenian, or some such bar- 
barous tongue, but we got along very well. I find that in 
cases like these, the fact that you can not comprehend each 
other isn't much of a drawback. In that Russian town of 
Yalta I danced an astonishing sort of dance an hour long, and 
one I had not heard of before, with a very pretty girl, and we 
talked incessantly, and laughed exhaustingly, and neither one 
ever knew what the other was driving at. But it was splendid. 
There were twenty people in the set, and the dance was very 
lively and complicated. It was complicated enough without 
me — with me it was more so. I threw in a figure now and 
then that surprised those Russians. But I have never ceased 
to think of that girl. I have written to her, but I can not 
direct the epistle because her name is one of those nine-jointed 
Eussian affairs, and there are not letters enough in our alpha- 
bet to hold out. I am not reckless enough to try to pronounce 
it when I am awake, but I make a stagger at it in my dreams, 
and get up with the lockjaw in the morning. I am fading. I 
do not take my meals now, with any sort of regularity. Her 
dear name haunts me still in my dreams. It is awful on teeth. 
It never comes out of my mouth but it fetches an old snag 
along with it. And then the lockjaw closes down and nips off 
a couple of the last syllables — but they taste good. 

Coming through the Dardanelles, we saw camel trains on 
shore with the glasses, but we were never close to one till we 
got to Smyrna. These camels are very much larger than the 
scrawny specimens one sees in the menagerie. They stride 
along these streets, in single file, a dozen in a train, with 



STREET SCENES. 



411 



heavy loads on their backs, and a fancy-looking negro in Turk- 
ish costume, or an Arab, preceding them on a little donkey 
and completely overshadowed and rendered insignificant by 
the huge beasts. To see a camel train laden with the spices 
of Arabia 
and the rare 
fabrics of 
Persia come 
marching 
through the 
narrow al- 
leys of the 
b a z a a r , 
among por- 
ters with 
their bur- 
dens, money- 
changers, 
lamp-mer- 
chants, Al- 
naschars in 
the glass- 
ware busi- 
ness, portly 
c ross-legged 
Turks smok- 
ing the fa- 
mous nar- 
ghili, and 

the crowds drifting to and fro in the fanciful costumes of the 
East, is a genuine revelation of the Orient. The picture lacks 
nothing. It casts you back at once into your forgotten boy- 
hood, and again you dream over the wonders of the Arabian 
Nights ; again your companions are princes, your lord is the 
Caliph Haroun Al Raschid, and your servants are terrific 
giants and genii that come with smoke and lightning and 
thunder, and go as a storm goes when they depart ! 




STREET SCENE IN SMYRNA. 



CHAPTEE XXXIX 



~YT7~E inquired, and learned that the lions of Smyrna con- 

▼ ▼ sisted of the ruins of the ancient citadel, whose broken 
and prodigious battlements frown upon the city from a lofty 
hill just in the edge of the town — the Mount Pagus of 
Scripture, they call it ; the site of that one of the Seven 
Apocalyptic Churches of Asia which was located here in 
the first century of the Christian era; and the grave and 
the place of martyrdom of the venerable Poly carp, who 
suffered in Smyrna for his religion some eighteen hundred 
years ago. 

We took little donkeys and started. We saw Polycarp's 
tomb, and then hurried on. 

The " Seven Churches " — thus they abbreviate it — came 
next on the list. We rode there — about a mile and a half in 
the sweltering sun — and visited a little Greek church which 
they said was built upon the ancient site ; and we paid a small 
fee, and the holy attendant gave each of us a little wax candle 
as a remembrancer of the place, and I put mine in my hat 
and the sun melted it and the grease all ran down the back of 
my neck ; and so now I have not any thing left but the wick, 
and it is a sorry and a wilted-looking wick at that. 

Several of us argued as well as we could that the " church" 
mentioned in the Bible meant a party of Christians, and not a 
building ; that the Bible spoke of them as being very poor — • 
so poor, I thought, and so subject to persecution (as per Poly- 
carp's martyrdom) that in the first place they probably could 



THE 



SEVEN CHURCHES. 



413 



not have afforded a church edifice, and in the second would 
not have dared to build it in the open light of day if they 
could ; and finally, that if they had had the privilege of build- 
ing it, common judgment would have suggested that they 
build it somewhere near the town. But the elders of the 
ship's family ruled us down and scouted our evidences. How- 
ever, retribution came to them afterward. They found that 
they had been led astray and had gone to the wrong place ; they 
discovered that the accepted site is in the city. 




SMYRNA. 



Riding through the town, we could see marks of the six 
Smyrnas that have existed here and been burned up by fire or 
knocked down by earthquakes. The hills and the rocks are 
rent asunder in places, excavations expose great blocks of 
building-stone that have lain buried for ages, and all the mean 
houses and walls of modern Smyrna along the way are spotted 
white with broken pillars, capitals and fragments of sculptured 
marble that once adorned the lordly palaces that were the 
glory of the city in the olden time. 



414 MYSTERIOUS OYSTER MINE. 

The ascent of the hill of the citadel is very steep, and we 
proceeded rather slowly. But there were matters of interest 
about us. In one £lace, five hundred feet above the sea, the 
perpendicular bank on the upper side of the road was ten or 
fifteen feet high, and the cut exposed three veins of oyster 
shells, just as we have seen quartz veins exposed in the cutting 
of a road in Nevada or Montana. The veins were about 
eighteen inches thick and two or three feet apart, and they 
slanted along downward for a distance of thirty feet or more, and 
then disappeared where the cut joined the road. Heaven only 
knows how far a man might trace them by " stripping." They 
were clean, nice oyster shells, large, and just like any other 
oyster shells. They were thickly massed together, and none 
were scattered above or below the veins. Each one was a 
well-defined lead by itself, and without a spur. My first in- 
stinct was to set up the usual — 

notice : 

" We, the undersigned, claim five claims of two hundred feet each, (and one for 
discovery,) on this ledge or lode of oyster-shells, with all its dips, spurs, angles, va- 
riations and sinuosities, and fifty feet on each side of the same, to work it, etc., eta, 
according to the mining laws of Smyrna." 

They were such perfectly natural-looking leads that I could 
hardly keep from " taking them up." Among the oyster-shells 
were mixed many fragments of ancient, broken crockery ware. 
Now how did those masses of oyster-shells get there ? I can 
not determine. Broken crockery and oyster-shells are suggest- 
ive of restaurants — but then they could have had no such 
places away up there on that mountain side in our time, be- 
cause nobody has lived up there. A restaurant would not pay 
in such a stony, forbidding, desolate place. And besides, there 
were no champagne corks among the shells. If there ever was 
a restaurant there, it must have been in Smyrna's palmy days, 
when the hills were covered with palaces. I could believe in 
one restaurant, on those terms ; but then how about the three ? 
Did they have restaurants there at three different periods of 
the world ? — because there are two or three feet of solid earth 



MYSTERIOUS OYSTER MINE. 415 

between the oyster leads. Evidently, the restaurant solution 
will not answer. 

The hill might have been the bottom of the sea, once, and 
been lifted up, with its oyster-beds, by an earthquake — but, 
then, how about the crockery ? And moreover, how about 
three oyster beds, one above another, and thick strata of good 
honest earth between ? 

That theory will not do. It is just possible that this hill is 
Mount Ararat, and that Noah's Ark rested here, and he ate 
oysters and threw the shells overboard. But that will not do, 
either. There are the three layers again and the solid earth 
between — and, besides, there were only eight in Noah's family, 
and they could not have eaten all these oysters in the two or 
three months they staid on top of that mountain. The 
beasts — however, it is simply absurd to suppose he did not 
know any more than to feed the beasts on oyster suppers. 

It is painful — it is even humiliating — but I am reduced 
at last to one slender theory : that the oysters climbed up there 
of their own accord. But what object could they have had in 
view ? — what did they want up there ? What could any oys* 
ter want to climb a hill for ? To climb a hill must necessarily 
be fatiguing and annoying exercise for an oyster. The most 
natural conclusion would be that the oysters climbed up there 
to look at the scenery. Yet when one comes to reflect upon 
the nature of an oyster, it seems plain that he does not care 
for scenery. An oyster has no taste for such things ; he cares 
nothing for the beautiful. An oyster is of a retiring disposi- 
tion, and not lively — not even cheerful above the average, and 
never enterprising. But above all, an oyster does not take any 
interest in scenery — he scorns it. What have I arrived at 
now ? Simply at the point I started from, namely, those oyster 
shells are there, in regular layers, five hundred feet above the 
sea, and no man knows how they got there. I have hunted 
up the guide-books, and the gist of what they say is this : 
* They are there, but how they got there is a mystery." 

Twenty-five years ago, a multitude of people in America 
put on their ascension robes, took a tearful leave of their 



416 



A TEMPORARY TRIUMPH. 



friends, and made ready to fly np into heaven at the first blast 
of the trumpet. But the angel did not blow it. Miller's res- 
urrection day was a failure. The Millerites were disgusted. 
I did not suspect that there were Millers in Asia Minor, but a 
gentleman tells me that they had it all set for the world to 
come to an end in Smyrna one day about three years ago. 
There was much buzzing and preparation for a long time pre- 




AN APPARENT SUCCESS. 



viously, and it culminated 
in a wild excitement at the 
appointed time. A vast 
number of the populace as- 
cended the citadel hill early 
in the morning, to get out 

of the way of the general destruction, and many of the infatu- 
ated closed up their shops and retired from all earthly busi- 
ness. But the strange part of it was that about three in the 
afternoon, while this gentleman and his friends were at dinner 
in the hotel, a terrific storm of rain, accompanied by thunder and 
lightning, broke forth and continued with dire fury for two or 
three hours. It was a thing unprecedented in Smyrna at that 
time of the year, and scared some of the most skeptical. The 



CURIOUS PLACE FOR A RAILROAD. 417 

streets ran rivers and the hotel floor was flooded with water. 
The dinner had to be suspended. When the storm finished 
and left every body drenched through and through, and mel- 
ancholy and half-drowned, the ascensionists came down from 
the mountain as dry as so many charity-sermons ! They had 
been looking down upon the fearful storm going on below, 
and really believed that their proposed destruction of the world 
was proving a grand success. 

A railway here in Asia — in the dreamy realm of the Ori- 
ent — in the fabled land of the Arabian Nights — is a strange 
thing to think of. And yet they have one already, and are 
building another. The present one is well built and well con- 
ducted, by an English Company, but is not doing an immense 
amount of business. The first year it carried a good many 
passengers, but its freight list only comprised eight hundred 
pounds of figs ! 

It runs almost to the very gates of Ephesus — a town great in 
all ages of the world — a city familiar to readers of the Bible, 
and one which was as old as the very hills when the disciples 
of Christ preached in its streets. It dates back to the shadowy 
ages of tradition, and was the birthplace of gods renowned in 
Grecian mythology. The idea of a locomotive tearing through 
such a place as this, and waking the phantoms of its old days 
of romance out of their dreams of dead and gone centuries, is 
curious enough. 

We journey thither to-morrow to see the celebrated ruins. 

27 



I'll 



CHAPTER XL. 



THIS has been a stirring day. The Superintendent of the 
railway put a train at our disposal, and did us the fur- 
ther kindness of accompanying us to Ephesus and giving to us 
his watchful care. We brought sixty scarcely perceptible don- 
keys in the freight cars, for we had much ground to go over. 
We have seen some of the most grotesque costumes, along the 
line of the railroad, that can be imagined. I am glad that no 
possible combination of words could describe them, for I might 
then be foolish enough to attempt it. 

At ancient Ayassalook, in the midst of a forbidding desert, 
we came upon long lines of ruined aqueducts, and other rem- 
nants of architectural grandeur, that told us plainly enough 
we were nearing what had been a metropolis, once. We left 
the train and mounted the donkeys, along with our invited 
guests — pleasant young gentlemen from the officers' list of an 
American man-of-war. 

The little donkeys had saddles upon them which were made 
very high in order that the rider's feet might not drag the 
ground. The preventative did not work well in the cases of 
our tallest pilgrims, however. There were no bridles — noth- 
ing but a single rope, tied to the bit. It was purely orna- 
mental, for the donkey cared nothing for it. If he were drift- 
ing to starboard, you might put your helm down hard the 
other way, if it were any satisfaction to you to do it, but he 
would continue to drift to starboard all the same. There was 
only one process which could be depended on, and that was to 



THE VILLAINOUS DONKEYS. 



419 



get down and lift his rear around until his head pointed in the 
right direction, or take him under your arm and carry him to 
a part of the road which he could not get out of without 
climbing. The sun flamed down as hot as a furnace, and neck- 
scarfs, veils and umbrellas seemed hardly any protection; 
they served only to make the long procession look more than 
ever fantastic — for be it known the ladies were all riding 
astride because they could not stay on the shapeless saddles 




DRIFTING TO STARBOARD. 



sidewise, the men were perspiring and out of temper, their 
feet were banging against the rocks, the donkeys were caper- 
ing in every direction but the right one and being belabored 
with clubs for it, and every now and then a broad umbrella 
would suddenly go down out of the cavalcade, announcing to 
all that one more pilgrim had bitten the dust. It was a wilder 
picture than those solitudes had seen for many a day. No 
donkeys ever existed that were as hard to navigate as these, I 
think, or that had so many vile, exasperating instincts. Occa- 



420 



BYGONE MAGNIFICENCE. 




A SPOILED NAP. 



sionally we grew so tired and breathless with fighting them 
that we had to desist, — and immediately the donkey would 

come down to a de- 
liberate walk. This, 
with the fatigue, and 
the sun, would put a 
man asleep ; and as 
soon as the man was 
asleep, the donkey 
would lie down. My 
donkey shall never 
see his boyhood's 
home again. He has 
lain down once too 
often. He must die. 
We all stood in the 
vast theatre of ancient Ephesus, — the stone-benched amphi- 
theatre I mean — and had our picture taken. We looked as 
proper there as we would look any where, I suppose. We do 
not embellish the general desolation of a desert much. We 
add what dignity we can to a stately ruin with our green um- 
brellas and jackasses, but it is little. However, we mean 
well. 

I wish to say a brief word of the aspect of Ephesus. 
On a high, steep hill, toward the sea, is a gray ruin of pon- 
derous blocks of marble, wherein, tradition says, St. Paul was 
imprisoned eighteen centuries ago. From these old walls you 
have the finest view of the desolate scene where once stood 
Ephesus, the proudest city of ancient times, and whose Temple 
of Diana was so noble in design, and so exquisite of workman- 
ship, that it ranked high in the list of the Seven Wonders of 
the World. 

Behind you is the sea ; in front is a level green valley, (a 
marsh, in fact,) extending far away among the mountains ; to 
the right of the front view is the old citadel of Ayassalook, on 
a high hill ; the ruined Mosque of the Sultan Selim stands 
near it in the plain, (this is built over the grave of St. John, 



BYGONE MAGNIFICENCE. 421 

and was formerly a Christian Church ;) further toward you is 
the hill of Pion, around whose front is clustered all that re- 
mains of the ruins of Ephesus that still stand ; divided from it 
by a narrow valley is the long, rocky, ringed mountain of Co- 
ressus. The scene is a pretty one, and yet desolate — for in 
that wide plain no man can live, and in it is jio human habit- 
ation. But for the crumbling arches and monstrous piers and 
broken walls that rise from the foot of the hill of Pion, one 
could not believe that in this place once stood a city whose re- 
nown is older than tradition itself. It is incredible to reflect 
that things as familiar all over the world to-day as household 
words, belong in the history and in the shadowy legends of 
this silent, mournful solitude. We speak of Apollo and of 
Diana — they were born here ; of the metamorphosis of Syrinx 
into a reed — it was done here ; of the great god Pan — he 
dwelt in the caves of this hill of Coressus ; of the Amazons — 
this was their best prized home ; of Bacchus and Hercules — 
both fought the warlike women here ; of the Cyclops — they 
laid the ponderous marble blocks of some of the ruins yonder ; 
of Homer — this was one of his many birthplaces ; of Cimon 
of Athens ; of Alcibiades, Lysander, Agesilaus — they visited 
here ; so did Alexander the Great ; so did Hannibal and An- 
tiochus, Scipio, Lucullus and Sylla ; Brutus, Cassius, Pompey, 
Cicero, and Augustus ; Antony was a judge in this place, and 
left his seat in the open court, while the advocates were speak- 
ing, to run after Cleopatra, who passed the door ; from this city 
these two sailed on pleasure excursions, in galleys with silver 
oars and perfumed sails, and with companies of beautiful girls 
to serve them, and actors and musicians to amuse them ; in 
days that seem almost modern, so remote are they from the 
early history of this city, Paul the Apostle preached the new 
religion here, and so did John, and here it is supposed the for- 
mer was pitted against wild beasts, for in 1 Corinthians, xv. 32 
he says : 

" If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus," &c, 

when many men still lived who had seen the Christ ; here 



422 



FRAGMENTS OF HISTORY 



Mary Magdalen died, and here the Virgin Mary ended her 
days with John, albeit Rome has since judged it best to locate 
her grave elsewhere ; six or seven hundred years ago — almost 
yesterday, as it were — troops of mail-clad Crusaders thronged 
the streets ; and to come down to trifles, we speak of meander- 
ing streams, and find a new interest in a common word when 
we discover that the crooked river Meander, in yonder valley, 
gave it to our dictionary. It makes me feel as old as these 

dreary hills to 
look down 
upon these 
moss-hung ru- 
ins, this his- 
toric desola- 
tion. One 
may read the 
Scriptures 
and believe, 
but he can not 
go and stand 
yonder in the 
ruined theatre 
and in imag- 
ination people 
it again with 
the vanished 
multitudes 
who mobbed 
Paul's com- 
rades there and shouted, with one voice, " Great is Diana of 
the Ephesians I" The idea of a shout in such a solitude as this 
almost makes one shudder. 

It was a wonderful city, this Ephesus. Go where you will 
about these broad plains, you find the most exquisitely sculp- 
tured marble fragments scattered thick among the dust and 
weeds ; and protruding from the ground, or lying prone upon 
it, are beautiful fluted columns of porphyry and all precious 




ANCIENT AMPHITHEATRE AT EPHESUS. 



A KELIC. 



423 



marbles ; and at every step you find elegantly carved capitals 
and massive bases, and polished tablets engraved with Greek 
inscriptions. It is a world of precious relics, a wilderness of 
marred and mutilated gems. And yet what are these things 
to the wonders that lie buried here under the ground ? At 
Constantinople, at Pisa, in the cities of Spain, are great 
mosques and cathedrals, whose grandest columns came from 
the temples and palaces of Ephesus, and yet one has only to 
scratch the ground here to match them. We shall never know 
what magnificence is, until this imperial city is laid bare to 
the sun. 

The finest piece of sculpture we have yet seen and the one 
that impressed 

us most, (for 

we do not know 
much about art 
and can not ea- 
sily work up 
ourselves into 
ecstacies over 
it,) is one that 
lies in this old 
theatre of Eph- 
esus which St. 
Paul's riot has 
made so cele- 
brated. It is 
only the head- 
less body of a 
man, clad in a 
coat of mail. 




MODERN AMPHITHEATRE AT EPHESUS. 



with a Medusa 

head upon the breast-plate, but we feel persuaded that such 
dignity and such majesty were never thrown into a form of 
stone before. 

What builders they were, these men of antiquity ! The 
massive arches of some of these ruins rest upon piers that are 



424 



MASSIVE MASONRY 



fifteen feet square and built entirely of solid blocks of marble, 
some of which are as large as a Saratoga trunk, and some the 
size of a boarding-house sofa. They are not shells or shafts of 
stone filled inside with rubbish, but the whole pier is a mass 
of solid masonry. Yast arches, that may have been the gates 
of the city, are built in the same way. They have braved the 
storms and sieges of three thousand years, and have been sha- 
ken by many an earthquake, but still they stand. When they 




RUINS OP EPHESUS. 



dig alongside of them, they find ranges of ponderous masonry 
that are as perfect in every detail as they were the day those 
old Cyclopian giants finished them. An English Company is 
going to excavate Ephesus — and then ! 
And now am I reminded of — 



THE LEGEND. 



425 



THE LEGEND OF THE SEVEN SLEEPERS. 

In the Mount of Pion, yonder, is the Cave of the Seven 
Sleepers. Once npon a time, about fifteen hundred years ago, 
seven young men lived near each other in Ephesus, who be- 
longed to the despised sect of the Christians. It came to pass 
that the good King Maximilianus, (I am telling this story for 
nice little boys and girls,) it came to pass, I say, that the good 
King Maximilianus fell to persecuting the Christians, and as 
time rolled on he made it very warm for them. So the seven 
young men said one to the other, let us get up and travel. 
And they got up and traveled. They tarried not to bid their 
fathers and mothers good-bye, or any friend they knew. They 
only took certain moneys which their parents had, and gar- 




THE JOURNEY. 



ments that belonged unto their friends, whereby they might 
remember them when far away ; and they took also the dog 
Ketmehr, which was the property of their neighbor Malchus, 
because the beast did run his head into a noose which one of 
the young men was carrying carelessly, and they had not time 
to release him ; and they took also certain chickens that 



426 THE SEVEN SLEEPERS. 

seemed lonely in the neighboring coops, and likewise some 
bottles of curious liquors that stood near the grocer's window ; 
and then they departed from the city. By-and-by they came 
to a marvelous cave in the Hill of Pion and entered into it 
and feasted, and presently they hurried on again. But they 
forgot the bottles of curious liquors, and left them behind. 
They traveled in many lands, and had many strange adven- 
tures. They were virtuous young men, and lost no opportu- 
nity that fell in their way to make their livelihood. Their 
motto was in these words, namely, " Procrastination is the thief 
of time." And so, whenever they did come upon a man who 
was alone, they said, Behold, this person hath the where- 
withal — let us go through him. And they went through 
him. At the end of five years they had waxed tired of travel 
and adventure, and longed to revisit their old home again and 
hear the voices and see the faces that were dear unto their 
youth. Therefore they went through such parties as fell in 
their way where they sojourned at that time, and journeyed 
back toward Ephesus again. For the good King Maximilianus 
was become converted unto the new faith, and the Christians 
rejoiced because they were no longer persecuted. One day as 
the sun went down, they came to the cave in the Mount of 
Pion, and they said, each to his fellow, Let us sleep here, and 
go and feast and make merry with our friends when the morn- 
ing cometh. And each of the seven lifted up his voice and 
said, It is a whiz. So they went in, and lo, where they had put 
them, there lay the bottles of strange liquors, and they judged 
that age had not impaired their excellence. Wherein the wan- 
derers were right, and the heads of the same were level. So 
each of the young men drank six bottles, and behold they felt 
very tired, then, and lay down and slept soundly. 

When they awoke, one of them, Johannes — surnamed Smith- 
ianus — said, We are naked. And it was so. Their raiment 
was all gone, and the money which they had gotten from a 
stranger whom they had proceeded through as they approached 
the city, was lying upon the ground, corroded and rusted and 
defaced. Likewise the dog Ketmehr was gone, and nothing 
save the brass that was upon his collar remained. They won- 



THE SEVEN SLEEPERS. 427 

dered much at these things. But they took the money, and 
they wrapped about their bodies some leaves, and came up to 
the top of the hill. Then were they perplexed. The wonder- 
ful temple of Diana was gone ; many grand edifices they had 
never seen before stood in the city; men in strange garbs 
moved about the streets, and every thing was changed. 

Johannes said, It hardly seems like Ephesus. Yet here is 
the great gymnasium ; here is the mighty theatre, wherein I 
have seen seventy thousand men assembled ; here is the Agora ; 
there is the font where the sainted John the Baptist immersed 
the converts ; yonder is the prison of the good St. Paul, where 
we all did use to go to touch the ancient chains that bound 
him and be cured of our distempers ; I see the tomb of the dis- 
ciple Luke, and afar off is the church wherein repose the ashes 
of the holy John, where the Christians of Ephesus go twice a 
year to gather the dust from the tomb, which is able to make 
bodies whole again that are corrupted by disease, and cleanse 
the soul from sin ; but see how the wharves encroach upon the 
sea, and what multitudes of ships are anchored in the bay ; 
see, also, how the city hath stretched abroad, far over the val- 
ley behind Pion, and even unto the walls of Ayassalook ; and 
lo, all the hills are white with palaces and ribbed with colon- 
nades of marble. How mighty is Ephesus become I 

And wondering at what their eyes had seen, they went down 
into the city and purchased garments and clothed themselves. 
And when they would have passed on, the merchant bit the 
coins which they had given him, with his teeth, and turned 
them about and looked curiously upon them, and cast them 
upon his counter, and listened if they rang ; and then he said, 
These be bogus. And they said, Depart thou to Hades, and 
went their way. When they were come to their houses, they 
recognized them, albeit they seemed old and mean ; and they 
rejoiced, and were glad. They ran to the doors, and knocked, 
and strangers opened, and looked inquiringly upon them. And 
they said, with great excitement, while their hearts beat high, 
and the color in their faces came and went, Where is my 
father? Where is my mother? Where are Dionysius and 



428 THE SEVEN SLEEPERS. 

Serapion, and Pericles, and Decius ? And the strangers that 
opened said, We know not these. The Seven said, How, you 
know them not % How long have ye dwelt here, and whither 
are they gone that dwelt here before ye ? And the strangers 
said, Ye play upon ns with a jest, young men ; we and our 
fathers have sojourned under these roofs these six generations ; 
the names ye utter rot upon the tombs, and they that bore 
them have run their brief race, have laughed and sung, have 
borne the sorrows and the weariness that were allotted them, 
and are at rest ; for nine-score years the summers have come 
and gone, and the autumn leaves have fallen, since the roses 
faded out of their cheeks and they laid them to sleep with the 
dead. 

Then the seven young men turned them away from their 
homes, and the strangers shut the doors upon them. The 
wanderers marveled greatly, and looked into the faces of all 
they met, as hoping to find one that they knew ; but all were 
strange, and passed them by and spake no friendly word. 
They were sore distressed and sad. Presently they spake unto 
a citizen and said, Who is King in Ephesus ? And the citizen 
answered and said, Whence come ye that ye know not that 
great Laertius reigns in Ephesus ? They looked one at the 
other, greatly perplexed, and presently asked again, Where, 
then, is the good King Maximilianus ? The citizen moved him 
apart, as one who is afraid, and said, "Verily these men be mad, 
and dream dreams, else would they know that the King 
whereof they speak is dead above two hundred years agone. 

Then the scales fell from the eyes of the Seven, and one said, 
Alas, that we drank of the curious liquors. They have made 
us weary, and in dreamless sleep these two long centuries have 
we lain. Our homes are desolate, our friends are dead. Be- 
hold, the jig is up — let us die. And that same day went they 
forth and laid them down and died. And in that self-same 
day, likewise, the Seven-up did cease in Ephesus, for that the 
Seven that were up were down again, and departed and dead 
withal. And the names that be upon their tombs, even unto 
this time, are Johannes Smithianus, Trumps, Gift, High, and 



THE SEVEN SLEEPERS. 



429 



Low, Jack, and The Game. And with the sleepers lie also the 
bottles wherein were once the curious liquors ; and upon them 
is writ, in 
ancient let- 
ters, such 
words as 
t h e s e — 
names of 
heathen 
gods of old- 
en time, 
perchance : 
Rumpunch, 
Jinsling, 
Egnog. 

Such is 
the story 

of the Seven Sleepers, (with slight variations,) and I know it is 
true, because I have seen the cave myself. 

Really, so firm a faith had the ancients in this legend, that 
as late as eight 1 or nine hundred years ago, learned travelers 
held it in superstitious fear. Two of them record that they 
ventured into it, but ran quickly out again, not daring to tarry 
lest they should fall asleep and outlive their great grand-chil- 
dren a century or so. Even at this day the ignorant denizens 
of the neighboring country prefer not to sleep in it. 




GRAVES OF THE SEVEN SLEEPERS. 



CHAPTER XLI. 

"TT7~HEN" I last made a memorandum, we were at Ephesus. 
▼ Y We are in Syria, now, encamped in the mountains of 
Lebanon. The interregnum has been long, both as to time 
and distance. We brought not a relic from Ephesus ! After 
gathering up fragments of sculptured marbles and breaking or- 
naments from the interior work of the Mosques ; and after 
bringing them at a cost of infinite trouble and fatigue, five 
miles on muleback to the railway depot, a government officer 
compelled all who had such things to disgorge ! He had an 
order from Constantinople to look out for our party, and see that 
we carried nothing off. It was a wise, a just, and a well-de- 
served rebuke, but it created a sensation. I never resist a 
temptation to plunder a stranger's premises without feeling in- 
sufferably vain about it. This time I felt proud beyond ex- 
pression. I was serene in the midst of the scoldings that were 
heaped upon the Ottoman government for its affront offered to 
a pleasuring party of entirely respectable gentlemen and ladies. 
I said, " We that have free souls, it touches us not." The shoe 
not only pinched our party, but it pinched hard ; a principal 
sufferer discovered that the imperial order was inclosed in an 
envelop bearing the seal of the British Embassy at Constanti- 
nople, and therefore must have been inspired by the represent- 
ative of the Queen. This was bad — very bad. Coming solely 
from the Ottomans, it might have signified only Ottoman hatred 
of Christians, and a vulgar ignorance as to genteel methods 
of expressing it; but coming from the Christianized, educated, 
politic British legation, it simply intimated that we were a sort 



APPROACHING HOLY LAND. 431 

of gentlemen and ladies who would bear watching ! So the 
party regarded it, and were incensed accordingly. The truth 
doubtless was, that the same precautions would have been ta- 
ken against any travelers, because the Engxish Company who 
have acquired the right to excavate Ephesus, and have paid a 
great sum for that right, need to be protected, and deserve to 
be. They can not afford to run the risk of having their hos- 
pitality abused by travelers, especially since travelers are such 
notorious scorners of honest behavior. 

We sailed from Smyrna, in the wildest spirit of expectancy, 
for the chief feature, the grand goal of the expedition, was 
near at hand — we were approaching the Holy Land ! Such a 
burrowing into the hold for trunks that had lain buried for 
weeks, yes for months ; such a hurrying to and fro above decks 
and below ; such a riotous system of packing and unpacking ; 
such a littering up of the cabins with shirts and skirts, and in- 
describable and unclassable odds and ends ; such a making up 
of bundles, and setting apart of umbrellas, green spectacles 
and thick veils ; such a critical inspection of saddles and bri- 
dles that had never yet touched horses ; such a cleaning and 
loading of revolvers and examining of bowie-knives ; such a 
half-soling of the seats of pantaloons with serviceable buck- 
skin ; then such a poring over ancient maps ; such a reading 
up of Bibles and Palestine travels ; such a marking out of 
routes ; such exasperating efforts to divide up the company 
into little bands of congenial spirits who might make the long 
and arduous journey without quarreling ; and morning, noon 
and night, such mass-meetings in the cabins, such speech-mak- 
ing, such sage suggesting, such worrying and quarreling, and 
such a general raising of the very mischief, was never seen in 
the ship before ! 

But it is all over now. "We are cut up into parties of six or 
eight, and by this time are scattered far and wide. Ours is 
the only one, however, that is venturing on what is called " the 
long trip " — that is, out into Syria, by Baalbec to Damascus, 
and thence down through the full length of Palestine. It 
would be a tedious, and also a too risky journey, at this hot 



432 THE "long" route adopted. 

season of the year, for any but strong, healthy men, accus- 
tomed somewhat to fatigue and rough life in the open air. 
The other parties will take shorter journeys. 

For the last two months we have been in a worry about one 
portion of this Holy Land pilgrimage. I refer to transporta- 
tion service. We knew very well that Palestine was a coun- 
try which did not do a large passenger business, and every 
man we came across who knew any thing about it gave us to 
understand that not half of our party would be able to get 
dragomen and animals. At Constantinople every body fell to 
telegraphing the American Consuls at Alexandria and Beirout 
to give notice that we wanted dragomen and transportation. 
We were desperate — would take horses, jackasses, cameleop- 
.ards, kangaroos — any thing. At Smyrna, more telegraphing 
was done, to the same end. Also, fearing for the worst, we 
telegraphed for a large number of seats in the diligence for 
Damascus, and horses for the ruins of Baalbec. 

As might have been expected, a notion got abroad in Syria 
and Egypt that the whole population of the Province of 
America (the Turks consider us a trifling little province in 
some un visited corner of the world,) were coming to the Holy 
Land — and so, when we got to Beirout yesterday, we found 
the place full of dragomen and their outfits. We had all in- 
tended to go by diligence to Damascus, and switch off to Baal- 
bec as we went along — because we expected to rejoin the ship, 
go to Mount Carmel, and take to the woods from there. How- 
ever, when our own private party of eight found that it was 
possible, and proper enough, to make the "long trip," we 
.adopted that programme. We have never been much trouble 
to a Consul before, but we have been a fearful nuisance to our 
Consul at Beirout. I mention this because I can not help ad- 
miring his patience, his industry, and his accommodating 
spirit. I mention it also, because I think some of our ship's 
company did not give him as full credit for his excellent ser- 
vices as he deserved. 

Well, out of our eight, three were selected to attend to all 
business connected with the expedition. The rest of us had 



PROSPECTING BEYEOUT. 433 

nothing to do but look at the beautiful city of Beirout, with its 
bright, new houses nestled among a wilderness of green shrub- 
bery spread abroad over an upland that sloped gently down to 
the sea ; and also at the mountains of Lebanon that environ 
it ; and likewise to bathe in the transparent blue water that 
rolled its billows about the ship (we did not know there were 
sharks there.) We had also to range up and down through 
the town and look at the costumes. These are picturesque 
and fanciful, but not so varied as at Constantinople and Smyr- 
na ; the women of Beirout add an agony — in the two former 
cities the sex wear a thin veil which one can see through (and 
they often expose their ancles,) but at Beirout they cover their 
entire faces with dark-colored or black veils, so that they look 
like mummies, and then expose their breasts to the public. A 
young gentleman (I believe he was a Greek,) volunteered to 
show us around the city, and said it would afford him great 
pleasure, because he was studying English and wanted practice 
in that language. When we had finished the rounds, how- 
ever, he called for remuneration — said he hoped the gentlemen 
would give him a trifle in the way of a few piastres (equivalent 
to a few five cent pieces.) We did so. The Consul was sur- 
prised when he heard it, and said he knew the young fellow's 
family very well, and that they were an old and highly respect- 
able family and worth a hundred and fifty thousand dollars ! 
Some people, so situated, would have been ashamed of the 
berth he had with us and his manner of crawling into it. 

At the appointed time our business committee reported, and 
said all things were in readiness — that we were to start to-day, 
with horses, pack animals, and tents, and go to Baalbec, Da- 
mascus, the Sea of Tiberias, and thence southward by the way 
of the scene of Jacob's Dream and other notable Bible local- 
ities to Jerusalem — from thence probably to the Dead Sea, but 
possibly not — and then strike for the ocean and rejoin the ship 
three or four weeks hence at Joppa ; terms, five dollars a day 
apiece, in gold, and every thing to be furnished by the drago- 
man. They said we would live as well as at a hotel. I had 
read something like that before, and did not shame my judg- 

28 



434 



THE HORSE HOSPITAL 



ment by believing a word of it. I said nothing, however, 
but packed up a blanket and a shawl to sleep in, pipes and 
tobacco, two or three woollen shirts, a portfolio, a guide-book, 
and a Bible. I also took along a towel and a cake of soap, to 
inspire respect in the Arabs, who would take me for a king in 
disguise. 

We were to select our horses at 3 p. m. At that hour Abra- 
ham, the 
dragoman, 
marshaled 
them before 
us. With 
all solemni- 
ty I set it 
down here, 
that those 
horses were 
the hardest 
lot I ever 
did come 
across, and 
their accou- 
trements 
were in ex- 
quisite keep- 
ing with 
their style. 

One brute had an eye out ; another had his tail sawed off close, 
like a rabbit, and was proud of it ; another had a bony ridge 
running from his neck to his tail, like one of those ruined 
aqueducts one sees about Rome, and had a neck on him like 
a bowsprit ; they all limped, and had sore backs, and likewise 
raw places and old scales scattered about their persons like 
brass nails in a hair trunk ; their gaits were marvelous to 
contemplate, and replete with variety — under way the proces- 
sion looked like a fleet in a storm. It was fearful. Blucher 
shook his head and said : 




THE SELECTION. 



SUMPTUOUS VAGABONDIZING. 435 

" That dragon is going to get himself into trouble fetching 
these old crates out of the hospital the way they are, unless he 
has got a permit." 

I said nothing. The display was exactly according to the 
guide-book, and were we not traveling by the guide-book ? I 
selected a certain horse because I thought I saw him shy, and 
I thought that a horse that had spirit enough to shy wa3 not 
to be despised. 

At 6 o'clock p. m., we came to a halt here on the breezy- 
summit of a shapely mountain overlooking the sea, and the 
handsome valley where dwelt some of those enterprising Phoe- 
nicians of ancient times we read so much about ; all around 
us are what were once the dominions of Hiram, King of Tyre, 
who furnished timber from the cedars of these Labanon hills 
to build portions of King Solomon's Temple with. 

Shortly after six, our pack train arrived. I had not seen it 
before, and a good right I had to be astonished. We had nine- 
teen serving men and twenty-six pack mules ! It was a perfect 
caravan. It looked like one, too, as it wound among the rocks. 
I wondered what in the very mischief we wanted with such a 
vast turn-out as that, for eight men. I wondered awhile, but 
soon I began to long for a tin plate, and some bacon and beans. 
I had camped out many and many a time before, and knew 
just what was coming. I went off, without waiting for serv- 
ing men, and unsaddled my horse, and washed such portions 
of his ribs and his spine as projected through his hide, and 
when I came back, behold five stately circus tents were up — 
tents that were brilliant, within, with blue, and gold, and 
crimson, and all manner of splendid adornment! I was 
speechless. Then they brought eight little iron bedsteads, and 
set them up in the tents ; they put a soft mattress and pillows 
and good blankets and two snow-white sheets on each bed. 
Next, they rigged a table about the centre-pole, and on it pla- 
ced pewter pitchers, basins, soap, and the whitest of towels — 
one set for each man ; they pointed to pockets in the tent, and 
said we could put our small trifles in them for convenience, 
and if we needed pins or such things, they were sticking every 



436 



SUMPTUOUS VAGABONDIZING 



where. Then came the finishing touch — they spread carpets 
on the floor ! I simply said, " If you call this camping out, 
all right — but it isn't the style / am used to ; my little bag- 
gage that I brought along is at a discount." 

It grew dark, and they put candles on the tables — candles 
set in bright, new, brazen candlesticks. And soon the bell — a 



- :: : 5 «ll 




CAMPING OUT. 



genuine, simon-pure bell — rang, and we were invited to " the 
saloon." I had thought before that we had a tent or so too 
many, but now here was one, at least, provided for ; it was to 
be used for nothing but an eating-saloon. Like the others, it 
was high enough for a family of giraffes to live in, and was 
very handsome and clean and bright-colored within. It was a 
gem of a place. A table for eight, and eight canvas chairs ; a 
table-cloth and napkins whose whiteness and whose fineness 
laughed to scorn the things we were used to in the great ex- 
cursion steamer ; knives and forks, soup-plates, dinner-plates 
— every thing, in the handsomest kind of style. It was won- 
derful ! And they call this camping out. Those stately fel- 
lows in baggy trowsers and turbaned fezzes brought in a dinner 
which consisted of roast mutton, roast chicken, roast goose, 



UNNECESSARY APOLOGY. 437 

potatoes, bread, tea, pudding, apples, and delicious grapes; 
the viands were better cooked than any we had eaten for 
weeks, and the table made a finer appearance, with its large 
German silver candlesticks and other finery, than any table we 
had sat down to for a good while, and yet that polite drago- 
man, Abraham, came bowing in and apologizing for the whole 
affair, on account of the unavoidable confusion of getting 
under way for a very long trip, and promising to do a great 
deal better in future ! 

It is midnight, now, and we break camp at six in the morn- 
ing. 

They call this camping out. At this rate it is a glorioua 
privilege to be a pilgrim to the Holy Land. 




CHAPTER XLII. 



\ \7~E are camped near Temnin-el-Foha — a name which, the 

V V boys have simplified a good deal, for the sake of con- 

yenience in spelling. They call it Jacksonville. It sounds a 

little strangely, here in the Yalley of Lebanon, but it has the 

merit of being easier to remember than the Arabic name. 

"come like spirits, so depart." 

"The night shall be filled with music, 
And the cares that infest the day 
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs, 
And as silently steal away." 

I slept very soundly last night, yet when the dragoman't 
bell rang at half-past five this morning and the cry went abroad 
of " Ten minutes to dress for breakfast !" I heard both. It 
surprised me, because I have not heard the breakfast gong in 
the ship for a month, and whenever we have had occasion to 
fire a salute at daylight, I have only found it out in the course 
of conversation afterward. However, camping out, even 
though it be in a gorgeous tent, makes one fresh and lively in 
the morning — especially if the air you are breathing is the 
cool, fresh air of the mountains. 

I was dressed within the ten minutes, and came out. The 
saloon tent had been stripped of its sides, and had nothing left 
but its roof; so when we sat down to table we could look out 
over a noble panorama of mountain, sea and hazy valley. And 
sitting thus, the sun rose slowly up and suffused the picture 
with a world of rich coloring. 



THE HORSE "JERICHO." 439 

Hot mutton chops, fried chicken, omelettes, fried potatoes 
and coffee — all excellent. This was the bill of fare. It was 
sauced with a savage appetite purchased by hard riding the 
day before, and refreshing sleep in a pure atmosphere. As I 
called for a second cup of coffee, I glanced over my shoulder, 
and behold our white village was gone — the splendid tents had 
ranished like magic ! It was wonderful how quickly those 
Arabs had " folded their tents ;" and it was wonderful, also, 
how quickly they had gathered the thousand odds and ends of 
the camp together and disappeared with them. 

By half-past six we were under way, and all the Syrian 
world seemed to be under way also. The road was filled with 
mule trains and long processions of camels. This reminds me 
that we have been trying for some time to think what a camel 
looks like, and now we have made it out. When he is down 
on all his knees, flat on his breast to receive his load, he looks 
something like a goose swimming ; and when he is upright he 
looks like an ostrich with an extra set of legs. Camels are not 
beautiful, and their long under lip gives them an exceedingly 
" gallus "* expression. They have immense, flat, forked cush- 
ions of feet, that make a track in the dust like a pie 
with a slice cut out of it. They are not particular about 
their diet. They would eat a tombstone if they could 
bite it. A thistle grows about here which has needles on it 
that would pierce through leather, 
I think ; if one touches you, you 
can find relief in nothing but pro- 
fanity. The camels eat these. 
They show by their actions that 
they enjoy them. I suppose it 
would be a real treat to a camel 
to have a keg of nails for supper. 

While I am speaking of ani- 
mals, I will mention that I have 

a horse now by the name of " Jericho." He is a mare. I have 

seen remarkable horses before, but none so remarkable as this. 

I wanted a horse that could shy, and this one fills the bill. I 

* Excuse the slang— no other word will describe i*. 




440 



THE HORSE "JERICHO. 



had an idea that shying indicated spirit. If I was correct, I 
have got the most spirited horse on earth. He shies at every 
thing he comes across, with the utmost impartiality. He ap- 
pears to have a mortal dread of telegraph poles, especially ; 
and it is fortunate that these are on both sides of the road, 
because as it is now, I never fall off twice in succession on the 
same side. If I fell on the same side always, it would get to 
be monotonous after a while. This creature has scared at 
every thing he has seen to-day, except a haystack. He walked 
up to that with an intrepidity and- a recklessness that were 
astonishing. And it would fill any one with admiration to see 
how he preserves his self-possession in the presence of a barley 
sack. This dare-devil bravery will be the death of this horse 
some day. 

He is not particularly fast, but I think he will get me through 
the Holy Land. He has only one fault. His tail has been 
chopped off or else he has sat down on it too hard, some time 

or other, and he has to 
fight the flies with his 
heels. This is all very 
well, but when he tries to 
kick a fly off the top of 
his head with his hind 
foot, it is too much varie- 
ty. He is going to get 
himself into trouble that 
way some day. He reach- 
es around and bites my 
legs too. I do not care 
particularly about that, 
only I do not like to see a 
horse too sociable. 

I think the owner of this 
prize had a wrong opinion 
about him. He had an 
idea that he was one of 

INTERESTING FETE. 

those fiery, untamed 
steeds, but he is not of that character. I know the Arab had 




ON HISTORICAL GROUND. 441 

this idea, because when he brought the horse out for inspection 
in Beirout, he kept jerking at the bridle and shouting in Ara- 
bic, "Ho ! will you? Do you want to run away, you ferocious 
beast, and break your neck ?" when all the time the horse was 
not doing any thing in the world, and only looked like he 
wanted to lean up against something and think. Whenever 
he is not shying at things, or reaching after a fly, he wants to 
do that yet. How it would surprise his owner to know this. 

We have been in a historical section of country all day. At 
noon we camped three hours and took luncheon at Meksek ? 
near the junction of the Lebanon Mountains and the Jebel el 
Kuneiyiseh, and looked down into the immense, level, garden- 
like Valley of Lebanon. To-night we are camping near the 
same valley, and have a very wide sweep of it in view. We 
can see the long, whale-backed ridge of Mount Hermon pro- 
jecting above the eastern hills. The " dews of Hermon " are 
falling upon us now, and the tents are almost soaked with 
them. 

Over the way from us, and higher up the valley, we can dis- 
cern, through the glasses, the faint outlines of the wonderful 
ruins of Baalbec, the supposed Baal-Gad of Scripture. Joshua, 
and another person, were the two spies who were sent into 
this land of Canaan by the children of Israel to report upon 
its character — I mean they were the spies who reported favor- 
ably. They took back with them some specimens of the grapes 
of this country, and in the children's picture-books they are 
always represented as bearing one monstrous bunch swung to 
a pole between them, a respectable load for a pack-train. The 
Sunday-school books exaggerated it a little. The grapes are 
most excellent to this day, but the bunches are not as large as 
those in the pictures. I was surprised and hurt when I saw 
them, because those colossal bunches of grapes were one of my 
most cherished juvenile traditions. 

Joshua reported favorably, and the children of Israel jour- 
neyed on, with Moses at the head of the general government, 
and Joshua in command of the army of six hundred thousand 
fighting men. Of women and children and civilians there was 



442 THE ANCIENT RAID. 

a countless swarm. Of all that mighty host, none but the two 
faithful spies ever lived to set their feet in the Promised Land. 
They and their descendants wandered forty years in the desert, 




SUNDAY-SCHOOL GRAPES. 



and then Moses, the gifted warrior, poet, statesman and phi- 
losopher, went up into Pisgah and met his mysterious fate. 
Where he was buried no man knows — for 

« * * * n0 man d U g that sepulchre, 
And no man saw it e'er — 

For the Sons of God upturned the sod 
And laid the dead man there !" 

Then Joshua began his terrible raid, and from Jericho clear 
to this Baal-Gad, he swept the land like the Genius of Destruc- 
tion. He slaughtered the people, laid waste their soil, and 
razed their cities to the ground. He wasted thirty-one kings 
also. One may call it that, though really it can hardly be 
called wasting them, because there were always plenty of kings 
in those days, and to spare. At any rate, he destroyed thirty- 
one kings, and divided up their realms among his Israelites. 
He divided up this valley stretched out here before us, and so 
it was once Jewish territory. The Jews have long since di»- 
appeared from it, however. 



443 

Back yonder, an hour's journey from here, we passed through 
an Arab village of stone dry-goods boxes (they look like that,) 
where Noah's tomb lies under lock and key. [Noah built the 
ark.] Over these old hills and valleys the ark that contained 
all that was left of a vanished world once floated. 

I make no apology for detailing the above information. It 
will be news to some of my readers, at any rate. 

Noah's tomb is built of stone, and is covered with a long 
stone building. Bucksheesh let us in. The building had to 
be long, because the grave of the honored old navigator is two 
hundred and ten feet long itself ! It is only about four feet 
high, though. He must have cast a shadow like a lightning- 
rod. The proof that this is the genuine spot where Noah was 
buried can only be doubted by uncommonly incredulous peo- 
ple. The evidence is pretty straight. Shem, the son of Noah, 
was present at the burial, and showed the place to his de- 
scendants, who transmitted the knowledge to their descendants, 
and the lineal descendants of these introduced themselves to 
us to-day. It was pleasant to make the acquaintance of mem- 
bers of so respectable a family. It was a thing to be proud of. 
It was the next thing to being acquainted with Noah himself. 

Noah's memorable voyage will always possess a living in- 
terest for me, henceforward. 

If ever an oppressed race existed, it is this one we see fet- 
tered around us under the inhuman tyranny of the Ottoman 
Empire. I wish Europe would let Russia annihilate Turkey a 
little — not much, but enough to make it difficult to find the 
place again without a divining-rod or a diving-bell. The Sy- 
rians are very poor, and yet they are ground down by a sys- 
tem of taxation that would drive any other nation frantic. 
Last year their taxes were heavy enough, in all conscience — but 
this year they have been increased by the addition of taxes that 
were forgiven them in times of famine in former years. On 
top of this the Government has levied a tax of one-tenth of the 
whole proceeds of the land. This is only half the story. The 
Pacha of a Pachalic does not trouble himself with appointing 
tax-collectors. He figures up what all these taxes ought to 



444 AN UNFORTUNATE PEOPLE. 

amount to in a certain district. Then he farms the collection 
out. He calls the rich men together, the highest bidder gets 
the speculation, pays the Pacha on the spot, and then sells out 
to smaller fry, who sell in turn to a piratical horde of still 
smaller fry. These latter compel the peasant to bring his little 
trifle of grain to the village, at his own cost. It must be 
weighed, the various taxes set apart, and the remainder re- 
turned to the producer. But the collector delays this duty day 
after day, while the producer's family are perishing for bread ; 
at last the poor wretch, who can not but understand the game, 
says, " Take a quarter — take half — take two-thirds if you will, 
and let me go !" It is a most outrageous state of things. 

These people are naturally good-hearted and intelligent, and 
with education and liberty, would be a happy and contented 
race. They often appeal to the stranger to know if the great 
world will not some day come to their relief and save them. 
The Sultan has been lavishing money like water in England 
and Paris, but his subjects are suffering for it now. 

This fashion of camping out bewilders me. "We have boot- 
jacks and a bath-tub, now, and yet all the mysteries the pack- 
mules carry are not revealed. What next ? 



CHAPTER XLIII. 

~TTT"E had a tedious ride of about five hours, in the sun, 
▼V across the Valley of Lebanon. It proved to be not 
quite so much of a garden as it had seemed from the hill-sides. 
It was a desert, weed-grown waste, littered thickly with stones 
the size of a man's fist. Here and there the natives had 
scratched the ground and reared a sickly crop of grain, but 
for the most part the valley was given up to a handful of shep- 
herds, whose flocks were doing what they honestly could to 
get a living, but the chances were against them. We saw 
rude piles of stones standing near the roadside, at intervals, 
and recognized the custom of marking boundaries which ob- 
tained in Jacob's time. There were no walls, no fences, no 
hedges — nothing to secure a man's possessions but these ran- 
dom heaps of stones. The Israelites held them sacred in the 
old patriarchal times, and these other Arabs, their lineal de- 
scendants, do so likewise. An American, of ordinary intelli- 
gence, would soon widely extend his property, at an outlay of 
mere manual labor, per- 
formed at night, under so 
loose a system of fencing 
as this. 

The plows these people 

. , , -AJf OLD FOGY. 

use are simply a sharp- 
ened stick, such as Abraham plowed with, and they still win- 
now their wheat as he did — they pile it on the house-top, and 
then toss it by shovel-fulls into the air until the wind has 




LU 



446 



MAGNIFICENT BAALBEC. 



blown all the chaff away. They never invent any thing, never 
learn any thing. 

"We had a fine race, of a mile, with an Arab perched on a 
camel. Some of the horses were fast, and made very good 
time, but the camel scampered by them without any very 
great effort. The yelling and shouting, and whipping and, 




EACE WITH CAMEL. 



galloping, of all parties interested, made it an exhilarating, 
exciting, and particularly boisterous race. 

At eleven o'clock, our eyes fell upon the walls and columns 
of Baalbec, a noble ruin whose history is a sealed book. It 
has stood there for thousands of years, the wonder and admi- 
ration of travelers ; but who built it, or when it was built, are 
questions that may never be answered. One thing is very 
sure, though. Such grandeur of design, and such grace of 
execution, as one sees in the temples of Baalbec, have not 



MAGNIFICENT BAALBEC 



447 



been equaled or even approached in any work of men's hands 
that has been built within twenty centuries past. 

The great Temple of the Sun, the Temple of Jupiter, and 
several smaller temples, are clustered together in the midst of 
one of these miserable Syrian villages, and look strangely 
enough in such plebeian company. These temples are built 
upon massive substructions that might support a world, almost ; 
the materials used are blocks of stone as large as an omnibus 
— very few, if any of them, are smaller than a carpenter's tool 
chest — and these substructions are traversed by tunnels of 
masonry through which a train of cars might pass. With 
such foundations as these, it is little wonder that Baalbec has 
lasted so long. The 
Temple of the Sun is 
nearly three hundred 
feet long and one 
hundred and sixty feet 
wide. It had fifty- 
four columns around 
it, but only six are 
stand in g now — the 
others lie broken at 
its base, a confused 
and picturesque heap. 
The six columns are 
perfect, as also are 
their bases, Corinthian 
capitals and entabla- 
ture — and six more 
shapely columns do 
not exist. The col- 
umns and the entab- 
lature together are 
ninety feet high — a 
prodigious altitude for 
shafts of stone to reach, truly — and yet one only thinks of 
their beauty and symmetry when looking at them ; the pillars 




TEMPLE OF THE SUN. BAALBEC. 



448 MAGNIFICENT BAALBEC. 

look slender and delicate, the entablature, with its elaborate 
sculpture, looks like rich stucco-work. But when you have 
gazed aloft till your eyes are weary, you glance at the great 
fragments of pillars among which you are standing, and find 
that they are eight feet through ; and with them lie beautiful 
capitals apparently as large as a small cottage ; and also single 
slabs of stone, superbly sculptured, that are four or five feet 
thick, and would completely cover the floor of any ordinary 
parlor. You wonder where these monstrous things came 
from, and it takes some little time to satisfy yourself that the 
airy and graceful fabric that towers above your head is made 
up of their mates. It seems too preposterous. 

The Temple of Jupiter is a smaller ruin than the one I have 
been speaking of, and yet is immense. It is in a tolerable 
state of preservation. One row of nine columns stands almost 
uninjured. They are sixty-five feet high and support a sort of 
porch or roof, which connects them with the roof of the build- 
ing. This porch-roof is composed of tremendous slabs of stone, 
which are so finely sculptured on the under side that the work 
looks like a fresco from below. One or two of these slabs had 
fallen, and again I wondered if the gigantic masses of carved 
stone that lay about me were no larger than those above my 
head. Within the temple, the ornamentation was elaborate 
and colossal. What a wonder of architectural beauty and 
grandeur this edifice must have been when it was new ! And 
what a noble picture it and its statelier companion, with the 
chaos of mighty fragments scattered about them, yet makes in 
the moonlight ! 

I can not conceive how those immense blocks of stone were 
ever hauled from the quarries, or how they were ever raised to 
the dizzy heights they occupy in the temples. And yet these 
sculptured blocks are trifles in size compared with the rough- 
hewn blocks that form the wide verandah or platform which 
surrounds the Great Temple. One stretch of that platform, 
two hundred feet long, is composed of blocks of stone as large, 
and some of them larger, than a street-car. They surmount a 
wall about ten or twelve feet high. I thought those were 



MAGNIFICENT BAAL EEC. 



449 



large rocks, but they sank into insignificance compared with, 
those which formed another section of the platform. These 
were three in number, and I thought that each of them was 




RUINS OP BAALBEC. 



about as long as three street cars placed end to end, though of 
course they are a third wider and a third higher than a street 
car. Perhaps two railway freight cars of the largest pattern, 
placed end to end, might better represent their size. In com- 
bined length these three stones stretch nearly two hundred 
feet ; they are thirteen feet square ; two of them are sixty-four 
feet long each, and the third is sixty-nine. They are built 
into the massive wall some twenty feet above the ground. 
They are there, but how they got there is the question. I 
have seen the hull of a steamboat that was smaller than one 
of those stones. All these great walls are as exact and shapely 
as the flimsy things we build of bricks in these days. A race 

29 



450 



WONDERFUL STONES. 



of gods or of giants must have inhabited Baalbec many a cen, 
tury ago. Men like the men of our day could hardly rear such 
temples as these. 

We went to the quarry from whence the stones of Baalbec 
were taken. It was 'about a quarter of a mile off, and down 
hill. In a great pit lay the mate of the largest stone in the 
ruins. It lay there just as the giants of that old forgotten 
time had left it when they were called hence— just as they had 
left it, to remain for thousands of years, an eloquent rebuke 
unto such as are prone to think slightingly of the men who 
lived before them. This enormous block lies there, squared 




HEWN STONES — IN QUARRY. 



and ready for the builders' hands— a solid mass fourteen feet 
by seventeen, and but a few inches less than seventy feet long ! 
Two buggies could be driven abreast of each other, on its sur- 



PILGKIM FIDELITY TO LAW. 451 

face, from one end of it to the other, and leave room enough 
for a man or two to walk on either side. 

One might swear that all the John Smiths and George Wil- 
kinsons, and all the other pitiful nobodies between Kingdom 
Come and Baalbec would inscribe their poor little names upon 
the walls of Baalbec's magnificent ruins, and would add the 
town, the county and the State they came from — and swear- 
ing thus, be infallibly correct. It is a pity some great ruin 
does not fall in and flatten out some of these reptiles, and 
scare their kind out of ever giving their names to fame upon 
any walls or monuments again, forever. 

Properly, with the sorry relics we bestrode, it was a three 
days' journey to Damascus. It was necessary that we should 
do it in less than two. It was necessary because our three 
pilgrims would not travel on the Sabbath day. We were all 
perfectly willing to keep the Sabbath day, but there are times 
when to keep the letter of a sacred law whose spirit is righteous,, 
becomes a sin, and this was a case in point. We pleaded for 
the tired, ill-treated horses, and tried to show that their faith- 
ful service deserved kindness in return, and their hard lot 
compassion. But when did ever self-righteousness know the 
sentiment of pity ? What were a few long hours added to the 
hardships of some over-taxed brutes when weighed against the 
peril of those human souls ? It was not the most promising 
party to travel with and hope to gain a higher veneration for 
religion through the example of its devotees. We said the 
Saviour who pitied dumb beasts and taught that the ox must 
be rescued from the mire even on the Sabbath day, would not 
have counseled a forced march like this. We said the "long 
trip " was exhausting and therefore dangerous in the blistering 
heats of summer, even when the ordinary days' stages were 
traversed, and if we persisted in this hard march, some of us 
might be stricken down with the fevers of the country in con- 
sequence of it. Nothing could move the pilgrims. They 
must press on. Men might die, horses might die, but they 
must enter upon holy soil next week, with no Sabbath-breaking 
stain upon them. Thus they were willing to commit a sin 



452 



PILGRIM FIDELITY TO LAW. 



against the spirit of religious law, in order that they might 
preserve the letter of it. It was not worth while to tell them 
" the letter kills." I am talking now about personal friends ; 
men whom I like ; men who are good citizens ; who are hon- 
orable, upright, conscientious ; but whose idea of the Saviour's 
religion seems to me distorted. They lecture our shortcomings 
unsparingly, and every night they call us together and read t« 
us chapters from the Testament that are full of gentleness, of 







charity, and of tender mercy ; and then all the next day they 
stick to their saddles clear up to the summits of these rugged 
mountains, and clear down again. Apply the Testament'* 
gentleness, and charity, and tender mercy to a toiling, worn 
and weary horse % — Nonsense — these are for God's humam 
•creatures, not His dumb ones. What the pilgrims choose to 
do, respect for their almost sacred character demands that I 
should allow to pass — but I would so like to catch any other 
member of the party riding his horse up one of these exhaust- 
ing hills once ! 

We have given the pilgrims a good many examples that 
might benefit them, but it is virtue thrown away. They have 



FOUNTAIN OF BAAL AM S ASS. 



453 



never heard a cross word out of our lips toward each other — ■ 
but they have quarreled once or twice. We love to hear them 
at it, after they have been lecturing us. The very first thing 
they did, coming ashore at Beirout, was to quarrel in the boat. 
I have said I like them, and I do like them — but every time 
they read me a scorcher of a lecture I mean to talk back in print. 
Not content with doubling the legitimate stages, they 
switched off the main road 
and went away out of the 
way to visit an absurd 
fountain called Figia, be- 
cause Baalam's ass had 
drank there once. So we 
journeyed on, through the 
terrible hills and deserts 
and the roasting sun, and 
then far into the night, 
seeking the honored pool 
©f Baalam's ass, the patron 
saint of all pilgrims like us. 
note-book : 




PATRON SAINT. 



I find no entry but this in my 



" Rode to-day, altogether, thirteen hours, through deserts, partly, and partly over 
barren, unsightly hills, and latterly through wild, rocky scenery, and camped at 
about eleven o'clock at night on the banks of a limpid stream, near a Syrian village. 
Bo not know its name — do not wish to know it — want to go to bed. Two horses 
lame (mine and Jack's) and the others worn out. Jack and I walked three or four 
Miles, over the hills, and led the horses. Fun — but of a mild type." 

Twelve or thirteen hours in the saddle, even in a Christian 
land and a Christian climate, and on a good horse, is a tire- 
some journey; but in an oven like Syria, in a ragged spoon of 
a saddle that slips fore-and-aft, and " thort-ships," and every 
way, and on a horse that is tired and lame, and yet must be 
whipped and spurred with hardly a moment's cessation all day 
long, till the blood comes from his side, and your conscience 
hurts you every time you strike, if you are half a man, — it is a 
journey to be remembered in bitterness of spirit and execrated 
with emphasis for a liberal division of a man's lifetime. 



OHAPTEE XLIY". 

rp^HE next day was an outrage upon men and horses both. 
J- It was another thirteen-hour stretch (including an 
hour's " nooning.") It was over the barrenest chalk-hills and 
through the baldest canons that even Syria can show. The 
heat quivered in the air every where. In the canons we almost 
smothered in the baking atmosphere. On high ground, the 
reflection from the chalk-hills was blinding. It was cruel to 
urge the crippled horses, but it had to be done in order to 
make Damascus Saturday night. We saw ancient tombs and 
temples of fanciful architecture carved out of the solid rock 
high up in the face of precipices above our heads, but we had 
neither time nor strength to climb up there and examine 
them. The terse language of my note-book will answer for 
the rest of this day's experiences : 

Broke camp at 7 a. m., and made a ghastly trip through the Zeb Dana valley 
and the rough mountains — horses limping and that Arab screech-owl that does 
most of the singing and carries the water-skins, always a thousand miles ahead, of 
course, and no water to drink — will he never die ? Beautiful stream in a chasm, 
lined thick with pomegranate, fig, olive and quince orchards, and nooned an hour 
at the celebrated Baalam's Ass Fountain of Figia, second in size iu Syria, and the 
coldest water out of Siberia — guide-books do not say Baalam's ass ever drank there 
— somebody been imposing on the pilgrims, may be. Bathed in it — Jack and I. 
Only a second — ice-water. It is the principal source of the Abana river — only one- 
half mile down to where it joins. Beautiful place — giant trees all around — so shady 
and cool, if one could keep awake — vast stream gushes straight out from under the 
(mountain in a torrent. Over it is a very ancient ruin, with no known history — 
supposed to have been for the worship of the deity of the fountain or Baalam's ass 
•or somebody. Wretched nest of human vermin about the fountain — rags, dirt, 
sunken cheeks, pallor of sickness, sores, projecting bones, dull, aching misery in 



THE BEAUTIFUL CITY. 



455 



their eyes and ravenous hunger speaking from every eloquent fibre and muscle 
from head to foot. How they sprang upon a bone, how they crunched the bread 
we gave them ! Such as these to swarm about one and watch every bite he takes, 
with greedy looks, and swallow uncon- 
sciously every time he swallows, as if they 
half fancied the precious morsel went 
down their own throats — hurry up the 
caravan ! — I never shall enjoy a meal in 
this distressful country. To think of eat- 
ing three times every day under such cir- 
cumstances for three weeks yet — it is 
worse punishment than riding all day in 
the sun. There are sixteen starving babies 
from one to six years old in the party, and 
their legs are no larger than broom handles. 
Left the fountain at 1 p. m. (the fountain 
took us at least two hours out of our way,) 
and reached Mahomet's lookout perch, over 
Damascus, in time to get a good long look 
before it was necessary to move on. 
Tired? Ask of the winds that far away 
with fragments strewed the sea." 




WATER CARRIER. 



As the glare of day mellowed into twilight, we looked down 
upon a picture which is celebrated all over the world. I think 
I have read about four hundred times that when Mahomet was 
a simple camel-driver he reached this point and looked down 
upon Damascus for the first time, and then made a certain re- 
nowned remark. He said man could enter only one paradise ; 
he preferred to go to the one above. So he sat down there and 
feasted his eyes upon the earthly paradise of Damascus, and 
then went away without entering its gates. They have erected 
a tower on the hill to mark the spot where he stood. 

Damascus is beautiful from the mountain. It is beautiful 
even to foreigners accustomed to luxuriant vegetation, and I 
can easily understand how unspeakably beautiful it must be to 
eyes that are only used to the God-forsaken barrenness and 
desolation of Syria. I should think a Syrian would go wild 
with ecstacy when such a picture bursts upon him for the first 
time. 

From his high perch, one sees before him and below him, a 
wall of dreary mountains, shorn of vegetation, glaring fiercely 



456 THE BEAUTIFUL CITY. 

in the sun ; it fences in a level desert of yellow sand, smooth 
as velvet and threaded far away with fine lines that stand for 
roads, and dotted with creeping mites we know are camel- 
trains and journeying men ; right in the midst of the desert 
is spread a billowy expanse of green foliage ; and nestling in 
its heart sits the great white city, like an island of pearls and 
opals gleaming out of a sea of emeralds. This is the picture 
you see spread far below you, with distance to soften it, the 
sun to glorify it, strong contrasts to heighten the effects, and 
over it and about it a drowsing air of repose to spiritualize it 
and make it seem rather a beautiful estray from the mysterious 
worlds we visit in dreams than a substantial tenant of our 
coarse, dull globe. And when you think of the leagues of 
blighted, blasted, sandy, rocky, sun-burnt, ugly, dreary, infa- 
mous country you have ridden over to get here, you think it is 
the most beautiful, beautiful picture that ever human eyes 
rested upon in all the broad universe ! If I were to go to 
Damascus again, I would camp on Mahomet's hill about a 
week, and then go away. There is no need to go inside the 
walls. The Prophet was wise without knowing it when he 
decided not to go down into the paradise of Damascus. 

There is an honored old tradition that the immense garden 
which Damascus stands in was the Garden of Eden, and 
modern writers have gathered up many chapters of evidence 
tending to show that it really was the Garden of Eden, and 
that the rivers Pharpar and Abana are the " two rivers " that 
watered Adam's Paradise. It may be so, but it is not paradise 
now, and one would be as happy outside of it as he would be 
likely to be within. It is so crooked and cramped and dirty 
that one can not realize that he is in the splendid city he saw 
from the hill-top. The gardens are hidden by high mud- walls, 
and the paradise is become a very sink of pollution and un- 
comeliness. Damascus has plenty of clear, pure water in it, 
though, and this is enough, of itself, to make an Arab think it 
beautiful and blessed. Water is scarce in blistered Syria. 
We run railways by our large cities in America ; in Syria they 
curve the roads so as to make them run by the meagre little 



DAMASCUS THE ETERNAL. 457 

puddles they call " fountains," and which are not found oftener 
on a journey than every four hours. But the " rivers " of 
Pharpar and Abana of Scripture (mere creeks,) run through 
Damascus, and so every house and every garden have their 
sparkling fountains and rivulets of water. With her forest of 
foliage and her abundance of water, Damascus must be a 
wonder of wonders to the Bedouin from the deserts. Damas- 
cus is simply an oasis — that is what it is. For four thousand 
years its waters have not gone dry or its fertility failed. Now 
we can understand why the city has existed so long. It could 
not die. So long as its waters remain to it away out there in 
the midst of that howling desert, so long will Damascus live 
to bless the sight of the tired and thirsty wayfarer. 

" Though old as history itself, thou art fresh as the breath of spring, blooming as 
thine own rose-bud, and fragrant as thine own orange flower, Damascus, pearl of 
the East 1" 

Damascus dates back anterior to the days of Abraham, and 
is the oldest city in the world. It was founded by Uz, the 
grandson of Noah. " The early history of Damascus is 
shrouded in the mists of a hoary antiquity." Leave the 
matters written of in the first eleven chapters of the Old 
Testament out, and no recorded event has occurred in the 
world but Damascus was in existence to receive the news of 
it. Go back as far as you will into the vague past, there was 
always a Damascus. In the writings of every century for 
more than four thousand years, its name has been mentioned 
and its praises sung. To Damascus, years are only moments, 
decades are only flitting trifles of time. She measures time, 
not by days and months and years, but by the empires she has 
seen rise, and prosper and crumble to ruin. She is a type of 
immortality. She saw the foundations of Baalbec, and Thebes, 
and Ephesus laid ; she saw these villages grow into mighty- 
cities, and amaze the world with their grandeur — and she has 
lived to see them desolate, deserted, and given over to the 
owls and the bats. She saw the Israelitish empire exalted, 
and she saw it annihilated. She saw Greece rise, and flourisli 



458 DAMASCUS THE ETERNAL. 

two thousand years, and die. In her old age she saw Rome 
built ; she saw it overshadow the world with its power ; she 
saw it perish. The few hundreds of years of Genoese and 
Venetian might and splendor were, to grave old Damascus, 
only a trifling scintillation hardly worth remembering. Da- 
mascus has seen all that has ever occurred on earth, and still 
she lives. She has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand 
empires, and will see the tombs of a thousand more before she 
dies. Though another claims the name, old Damascus is by 
right the Eternal City. 

We reached the city gates just at sundown. They do say 
that one can get into any walled city of Syria, after night, for 
bucksheesh, except Damascus. But Damascus, with its four 
thousand years of respectability in the world, has many old 
fogy notions. There are no street lamps there, and the law 
compels all who go abroad at night to carry lanterns, just as 
was the case in old days, when heroes and heroines of the 
Arabian Nights walked the streets of Damascus, or flew away 
toward Bagdad on enchanted carpets. 

It was fairly dark a few minutes after we got within the 
wall, and we rode long distances through wonderfully crooked 
streets, eight to ten feet wide, and shut in on either side by the 
high mud-walls of the gardens. At last we got to where lanterns 
could be seen flitting about here and there, and knew we were 
in the midst of the curious old city. In a little narrow street, 
crowded with our pack-mules and with a swarm of uncouth 
Arabs, we alighted, and through a kind of a hole in the wall 
entered the hotel. We stood in a great flagged court, with 
flowers and citron trees about us, and a huge tank in the centre 
that was receiving the waters of many pipes. We crossed the 
court and entered the rooms prepared to receive four of us. In 
a large marble-paved recess between the two rooms was a tank 
of clear, cool water, which was kept running over all the time 
by the streams that were pouring into it from half a dozen 
pipes. Nothing, in this scorching, desolate land could look so 
refreshing as this pure water flashing in the lamp-light; 
nothing could look so beautiful, nothing could sound so deli- 



ORIENTAL LUXURY. 459 

cious as this mimic rain to ears long unaccustomed to sounds 
of such a nature. Our rooms were large, comfortably fur- 
nished, and even had their floors clothed with soft, cheerful- 
tinted carpets. It was a pleasant thing to see a carpet again, 
for if there is any thing drearier than the tomb-like, stone- 
paved parlors and bed-rooms of Europe and Asia, I do not 
know what it is. They make one think of the grave all the 
time. A very broad, gaily caparisoned divan, some twelve or 
fourteen feet long, extended across one side of each room, and 
opposite were single beds with spring mattr asses. There were 
great looking-glasses and marble-top tables. All this luxury 
was as grateful to systems and senses worn out with an 
exhausting day's travel, as it was unexpected — for one can not 
tell what to expect in a Turkish city of even a quarter of a 
million inhabitants. 

I do not know, but I think they used that tank between the 
rooms to draw drinking water from ; that did not occur to me, 
however, until I had dipped my baking head far down into its 
cool depths. I thought of it then, and superb as the bath was, 
I was sorry I had taken it, and was about to go and explain to 
the landlord. But a finely curled and scented poodle dog 
frisked up and nipped the calf of my leg just then, and before 
I had time to think, I had soused him to the bottom of the 
tank, and when I saw a servant coming with a pitcher I went 
off and left the pup trying to climb out and not succeeding 
very well. Satisfied revenge was all I needed to make me 
perfectly happy, and when I walked in to supper that first 
night in Damascus I was in that condition. We lay on those 
divans a long time, after supper, smoking narghilies and long- 
stemmed chibouks, and talking about the dreadful ride of the 
day, and I knew then what I had sometimes known before — 
that it is worth while to get tired out, because one so enjoys 
resting afterward. 

In the morning we sent for donkeys. It is worthy of note 
that we had to send for these things. I said Damascus was an 
old fossil, and she is. Any where else we would have been 
assailed by a clamorous army of donkey-drivers, guides, 



460 



RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE. 



peddlers and beggars — but in Damascus they so hate the very- 
sight of a foreign Christian that they want no intercourse 
whatever with him ; only a year or two ago, his person was 
not always safe in Damascus streets. It is the most fanatical 
Mohammedan purgatory out of Arabia. Where you see one 
green turban of a Hadji elsewhere (the honored sign that my 
lord has made the pilgrimage to Mecca,) I think you will see a 
dozen in Damascus. The Damascenes are the ugliest, wicked- 
est looking villains we have seen. All the veiled women we 
had seen yet, nearly, left their eyes exposed, but numbers of 
these in Damascus completely hid the face under a close-drawn 
black veil that made the woman look like a mummy. If ever 
we caught an eye exposed it was quickly hidden from our con- 
taminating Christian vision ; the beggars actually passed us by 
without demanding bucksheesh ; the merchants in the bazaars 

did not hold up their 
goods and cry out eager- 
ly, "Hey, John!" or 
" Look this, Howajji !" 
On the contrary, they 
only scowled at us and 
said never a word. 

The narrow streets 
swarmed like a hive with 
men and women in 
strange Oriental cos- 
tumes, and our small 
donkeys knocked them 
right and left as we 
plowed through them, 
urged on by the merci- 
less donkey-boys. These 
persecutors run after the 
animals, shouting and 
goading them for hours 
together; they keep the 
donkey in a gallop always, yet never get tired themselves or 




HOUSE OF JUDAS. 461 

fall behind. The donkeys fell down and spilt us over their 
heads occasionally, but there was nothing for it but to mount 
and hurry on again. We were banged against sharp corners, 
loaded porters, camels, and citizens generally ; and we were so 
taken up with looking out for collisions and casualties that we 
had no chance to look about us at all. We rode half through 
the city and through the famous " street which is called 
Straight " without seeing any thing, hardly. Our bones were 
nearly knocked out of joint, we were wild with excitement, 
and our sides ached with the jolting we had suffered. I do 
not like riding in the Damascus street-cars 

We were on our way to the reputed houses of Judas and 
Ananias. About eighteen or nineteen hundred years ago, 
Saul, a native of Tarsus, was particularly bitter against the 
new sect called Christians, and he left Jerusalem and started 
across the country on a furious crusade against them. He 
went forth " breathing threatenings and slaughter against the 
disciples of the Lord." 

"And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus, and suddenly there shined round 
about him a light from heaven : 

"And he fell to the earth and heard a voice saying unto him, 'Saul SauL why 
persecutest thou me ?' 

"And when he knew that it was Jesus that spoke to him he trembled, and was 
astonished, and said, ' Lord, what wilt thou have me to do ?' " 

He was told to arise and go into the ancient city and one 
would tell him what to do. In the meantime his soldiers 
stood speechless and awe-stricken, for they heard the mysteri- 
ous voice but saw no man. Saul rose up and found that that 
fierce supernatural light had destroyed his sight, and he was 
blind, so " they led him by the hand and brought him to Da- 
mascus." He was converted. 

Paul lay three days, blind, in the house of Judas, and during 
that time he neither ate nor drank. 

There came a voice to a citizen of Damascus, named Ana- 
nias, saying, "Arise, and go into the street which is called 
Straight, and inquire at the house of Judas, for one called 
Saul, of Tarsus ; for behold, he prayeth." 



462 THE "STREET CALLED STRAIGHT." 

Ananias did not wish to go at first, for he had heard of Saul 
before, and he had his doubts about that style of a " chosen 
vessel " to preach the gospel of peace. However, in obedience 
to orders, he went into the " street called Straight " (how he 
ever found his way into it, and after he did, how he ever found 
his way out of it again, are mysteries only to be accounted for 
by the fact that he was acting under Divine inspiration.) He 
found Paul and restored him, and ordained him a preacher; 
and from this old house we had hunted up in the street which 
is miscalled Straight, he had started out on that bold mission 
ary career which he prosecuted till his death. It was not the 
house of the disciple who sold the Master for thirty pieces of 
silver. I make this explanation in justice to Judas, who was 
a far different sort of man from the person just referred to. 
A very different style of man, and lived m a very good house. 
It is a pity we do not know more about him. 

I have given, in the above paragraphs, some more informa- 
tion for people who will not read Bible history until they are 
defrauded into it by some such method as this. I hope that 
no friend of progress and education will obstruct or interfere 
with my peculiar mission. 

The street called Straight is straighter than a corkscrew, but 
uot as straight as a rainbow. St. Luke is careful not to com- 
vnit himself; he does not say it is the street which is straight, 
but the " street which is called Straight." It is a fine piece of 
irony ; it is the only facetious remark in the Bible, I believe. 
We traversed the street called Straight a good way, and then 
turned off and called at the reputed house of Ananias. There 
is small question that a part of the original house is there still ; 
it is an old room twelve or fifteen feet under ground, and its 
masonry is evidently ancient. If Ananias did not live there in 
St. Paul's time, somebody else did, which is just as well. I 
took a drink out of Ananias' well, and singularly enough, the 
water was just as fresh as if the well had been dug yesterday. 

We went out toward the north end of the city to see the 
place where the disciples let Paul down over the Damascus 
wall at dead of night — for he preached Christ so fearlessly 



A CARNIVAL OF BLOOD. 463 

in Damascus that the people sought to kill him, just as they 
would to-day for the same offense, and he had to escape and 
flee to Jerusalem. 

Then we called at the tomb of Mahomet's children and at a 
tomb which purported to be that of St. George who killed the 
dragon, and so on out to the hollow place under a rock where 
Paul hid during his flight till his pursuers gave him up ; and 
to the mausoleum of the five thousand Christians who were 
massacred in Damascus in 1861 by the Turks. They say 
those narrow streets ran blood for several days, and that men, 
women and children were butchered indiscriminately and left 
to rot by hundreds all through the Christian quarter; they 
say, further, that the stench was dreadful. All the Christians 
who could get away fled from the city, and the Mohammedans 
would not defile their hands by burying the " infidel dogs." 
The thirst for blood extended to the high lands of Hermon and 
Anti-Lebanon, and in a short time twenty-five thousand more 
Christians were massacred and their possessions laid waste. 
How they hate a Christian in Damascus ! — and pretty much 
all over Turkey dom as well. And how they will pay for it 
when Russia turns her guns upon them again ! 

It is soothing to the heart to abuse England and France for 
interposing to save the Ottoman Empire from the destruction 
it has so richly deserved for a thousand years. It hurts my 
vanity to see these pagans refuse to eat of food that has been 
cooked for us ; or to eat from a dish we have eaten from ; or 
to drink from a goatskin which we have polluted with our 
Christian lips, except by filtering the water through a rag 
which they put over the mouth of it or through a sponge ! I 
never disliked a Chinaman as I do these degraded Turks and 
Arabs, and when Russia is ready to war with them again, I 
hope England and France will not find it good breeding or 
good judgment to interfere. 

In Damascus they think there are no such rivers in all the 
world as their little Abana and Pharpar. The Damascenes 
have always thought that way. In 2 Kings, chapter v., Naa- 
man boasts extravagantly about them. That was three thou- 



464 

sand years ago. He says: "Are not Abana and Pharpar, 
rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel ? May 
I not wash in them and be clean ?" But some of my reader* 
have forgotten who Naaman was, long ago. Naainan was 
the commander of the Syrian armies. He was the favor- 
ite of the king and lived in great state. " He was a mighty 
man of valor, but he was a leper." Strangely enough, the 
house they point out to you now as his, has been turned into a, 
leper hospital, and the inmates expose their horrid deformities 
and hold up their hands and beg for bucksheesh when a 
stranger enters. 

One can not appreciate the horror of this disease until he 
looks upon it in all its ghastliness, in ISTaaman's ancient dwell- 
ing in Damascus. Bones all twisted out of shape, great knots 
protruding from face and body, joints decaying and dropping 
away — horrible ! 



CHAPTER XLY. 

THE last twenty-four hours we staid in Damascus I lay- 
prostrate with a violent attack of cholera, or cholera 
morbus, and therefore had a good chance and, a good excuse to 
lie there on that wide divan and take an honest rest. I had 
nothing to do but listen to the pattering of the fountains and 
take medicine and throw it up again. It was dangerous recre- 
ation, but it was pleasanter than traveling in Syria. I had 
plenty of snow from Mount Hermon, and as it would not stay 
on my stomach, there was nothing to interfere with my eating 
it — there was always room for more. I enjoyed myself very 
well. Syrian travel has its interesting features, like travel in 
any other part of the world, and yet to break your leg or have 
the cholera adds a welcome variety to it. 

We left Damascus at noon and rode across the plain a 
couple of hours, and then the party stopped a while in the 
shade of some fig-trees to give me a chance to rest. It was 
the hottest day we had seen yet — the sun-flames shot down 
like the shafts of fire that stream out before a blow-pipe ; the 
rays seemed to fall in a steady deluge on the head and pass 
downward like rain from a roof. I imagined I could distin- 
guish between the floods of rays — I thought I could tell when 
each flood struck my head, when it reached my shoulders, and 
when the next one came. It was terrible. All the desert 
glared so fiercely that my eyes were swimming in tears all the 
time. The boys had white umbrellas heavily lined with dark 
green. They were a priceless blessing. I thanked fortune 
that I had one, too, notwithstanding it was packed up with 

30 



466 



FANTASTIC PROCESSION. 



the baggage and was ten miles ahead. It is madness to travel 
in Syria without an umbrella. They told me in Beirout (these 
people who always gorge you with advice) that it was madness 
to travel in Syria without an umbrella. It was on this account 
that I got one. 

But, honestly, I think an umbrella is a nuisance any where 
when its business is to keep the sun off. No Arab wears a 
brim to his fez, or uses an umbrella, or any thing to shade his 
eyes or his face, and he always looks comfortable and proper 
in the sun. But of all the ridiculous sights I ever have seen, 

our party of eight 
is the most so — ■ 
they do cut such an 
outlandish figure. 
They travel single 
file ; they all wear 
the endless white 
rag of Constantino^ 
pie wrapped round 
and round their 
hats and dangling 
down their backs ; 
they all wear thick 
green spectacles, 
with side-glasses to 
them ; they all hold 
white umbrellas, 
lined with green, 
over their heads; 
without exception 
their stirrups are 
too short — they are 
the very worst gang 
of horsemen on 
earth ; their animals to a horse trot fearfully hard — and when 
they get strung out one after the other ; glaring straight ahead 
and breathless ; bouncing high and out of turn, all along the 




FULL-DRESSED TOURIST. 



CURIOUS INCONGRUITY. 467 

line ; knees well up and stiff, elbows napping like a rooster's 
that is going to crow, and the long hie of umbrellas popping 
convulsively up and down — when one sees this outrageous pic- 
ture exposed to the light of day, he is amazed that the gods 
don't get out their thunderbolts and destroy them off the face 
of the earth ! I do — I wonder at it. I wouldn't let any such 
caravan go through a country of mine. 

And when the sun drops below the horizon and the boys 
close their umbrellas and put them under their arms, it is only 
a variation of the picture, not a modification of its absurdity. 

But may be you can not see the wild extravagance of my 
panorama. You could if you were here. Here, you feel all 
the time just as if you were living about the year 1200 before 
Christ — or back to the patriarchs — or forward to the New Era. 
The scenery of the Bible is about you — the customs of the pa- 
triarchs are around you — the same people, in the same flowing 
robes, and in sandals, cross your path — the same long trains 
of stately camels go and come — the same impressive religious 
solemnity and silence rest upon the desert and the mountains 
that were upon them in the remote ages of antiquity, and be- 
hold, intruding upon a scene like this, comes this fantastic 
mob of green-spectacled Yanks, with their flapping elbows and 
bobbing umbrellas ! It is Daniel in the lion's den with a green 
cotton umbrella under his arm, all over again. 

My umbrella is with the baggage, and so are my green spec- 
tacles^ — and there they shall stay. I will not use them. I 
will show some respect for the eternal fitness of things. It 
will be bad enough to get sun-struck, without looking ridicu- 
lous into the bargain. If I fall, let me fall bearing about me 
the semblance of a Christian, at least. 

Three or four hours out from Damascus we passed the spot 
where Saul was so abruptly converted, and from this place we 
looked back over the scorching desert, and had our last glimpse 
of beautiful Damascus, decked in its robes of shining green. 
After nightfall we reached our tents, just outside of the nasty 
Arab village of Jonesborough. Of course the real name of the 
place is El something or other, but the boys still refuse to 



468 GRAVE OF NIMROD. 

recognize the Arab names or try to pronounce them. When 
I say that that village is of the usual style, I mean to insin- 
uate thai all Syrian villages within fifty miles of Damascus are 
alike — so much alike that it would require more than human 
intelligence to tell wherein one differed from another. A Sy- 
rian village is a hire of huts one story high (the height of a 
man,) and as square as a dry-goods box ; it is mud-plastered 
all over, flat roof and all, and generally whitewashed after a 
fashion. The same roof often extends over half the town, cov- 
ering many of the streets, which are generally about a yard 
wide. When you ride through one of these villages at noon- 
day, you first meet a melancholy dog, that looks up at you and 
silently begs that you won't run over him, but he does not 
offer to get out of the way ; next you meet a young boy with- 
out any clothes on, and he holds out his hand and says " Buck- 
sheesh I" — he don't really expect a cent, but then he learned tc 
say that before he learned to say mother, and now he can not 
break himself of it ; next you meet a woman with a black veil 
drawn closely over her face, and her bust exposed ; finally, you 
come to several sore-eyed children and children in all stages of 
mutilation and decay ; and sitting humbly in the dust, and all 
fringed with filthy rags, is a poor devil whose arms and legs 
are gnarled and twisted like grape-vines. These are all the 
people you are likely to see. The balance of the population 
are asleep within doors, or abroad tending goats in the plains 
and on the hill-sides. The village is built on some consumptive 
little water-course, and about it is a little fresh-looking vege- 
tation. Beyond this charmed circle, for miles on every side, 
stretches a weary desert of sand and gravel, which produces a 
gray bunchy shrub like sage-brush. A Syrian village is the 
sorriest sight in the world, and its surroundings are eminently 
in keeping with it. 

I would not have gone into this dissertation upon Syrian 
villages but for the fact that Nimrod, the Mighty Hunter of 
Scriptural notoriety, is buried in Jonesborough, and I wished 
the public to know about how he is located. Like Homer, h© 
is said to be buried in many other places, but this is the only 
true and genuine place his ashes inhabit. 



A STATELY RUIN. 469 

When the original tribes were dispersed, more than four 
thousand years ago, Nimrod and a large party traveled three 
or four hundred miles, and settled where the great city of 
Babylon afterwards stood. Nnnrod built that city. He also 
began to build the famous Tower of Babel, but circumstances 
over which he had no control put it out of his power to finish 
it. He ran it up eight stories high, however, and two of them 
still stand, at this day — a colossal mass of brickwork, rent 
down the centre by earthquakes, and seared and vitrified by 
the lightnings of an angry God. But the vast ruin will still 
stand for ages, to shame the puny labors of these modern gen- 
erations of men. Its huge compartments are tenanted by owls 
and lions, and old JSTimrod lies neglected in this wretched vil- 
lage, far from the scene of his grand enterprise. 

We left Jonesborough very early in the morning, and rode 
forever and forever and forever, it seemed to me, over parched 
deserts and rocky hills, hungry, and with no water to drink. 
We had drained the goat-skins dry in a little while. At noon 
we halted before the wretched Arab town of El Yuba Dam, 
perched on the side of a mountain, but the dragoman said if 
we applied there for water we would be attacked by the whole 
tribe, for they did not love Christians. We had to journey on. 
Two hours later we reached the foot of a tall isolated moun- 
tain, which is crowned by the crumbling castle of Banias, the 
stateliest ruin of that kind on earth, no doubt. It is a thou- 
sand feet long and two hundred wide, all of the most symmet- 
rical, and at the same time the most ponderous masonry. The 
massive towers and bastions are more than thirty feet high, 
and have been sixty. From the mountain's peak its broken 
turrets rise above the groves of ancient oaks and olives, and 
look wonderfully picturesque. It is of such high antiquity 
that no man knows who built it or when it was built. It is ut- 
terly inaccessible, except in one place, where a bridle-path 
winds upward among the solid rocks to the old portcullis. 
The horses' hoofs have bored holes in these rocks to the depth 
of six inches during the hundreds and hundreds of years that 
the castle was garrisoned. We wandered for three hours 



470 ENTERING HOLY LAND. 

among the chambers and crypts and dungeons of the fortress, 
and trod where the mailed heels of many a knightly Crusader 
had rang, and where Phenician heroes had walked ages before 
them. 

We wondered how such a solid mass of masonry could be 
affected even by an earthquake, and could not understand 
what agency had made Banias a ruin ; but we found the de- 
stroyer, after a while, and then our wonder was increased ten- 
fold. Seeds had fallen in crevices in the vast walls ; the seeds 
had sprouted ; the tender, insignificant sprouts had hardened ; 
they grew larger and larger, and by a steady, imperceptible 
pressure forced the great stones apart, and now are bringing 
sure destruction upon a giant work that has even mocked the 
earthquakes to scorn ! Gnarled and twisted trees spring from 
the old walls every where, and beautify and overshadow the 
gray battlements with a wild luxuriance of foliage. 

From these old towers we looked down upon a broad, far- 
reaching green plain, glittering with the pools and rivulets 
which are the sources of the sacred river Jordan. It was a 
grateful vision, after so much desert. 

And as the evening drew near, we clambered down the 
mountain, through groves of the Biblical oaks of Bashan, (for 
we were just stepping over the border and entering the long- 
sought Holy Land,) and at its extreme foot, toward the wide 
valley, we entered this little execrable village of Banias and 
camped in a great grove of olive trees near a torrent of spark- 
ling water whose banks are arrayed in fig-trees, pomegranates 
and oleanders in full leaf. Barring the proximity of the vil- 
lage, it is a sort of paradise. 

The very first thing one feels like doing when he gets into 
camp, all burning up and dusty, is to hunt up a bath. We 
followed the stream up to where it gushes out of the mountain 
side, three hundred yards from the tents, and took a bath that 
was so icy that if I did not know this was the main source of 
the sacred river, I would expect harm to come of it. It waa 
bathing at noonday in the chilly source of the Abana, " River 
of Damascus," that gave me the cholera, so Dr. B. said. How- 
ever, it generally does give me the cholera te take a bath, 



BIRTHPLACE OF CHURCH OF ROME. 471 

The incorrigible pilgrims have come in with their pockets 
full of specimens broken from the ruins. I wish this vandal- 
ism could be stopped. They broke off fragments from Noah's 
tomb ; from the exquisite sculptures of the temples of Baalbec ; 
from the houses of Judas and Ananias, in Damascus ; from 
the tomb of Nimrod the Mighty Hunter in Jonesborough ; 
from the worn Greek and Roman inscriptions set in the hoary 
walls of the Castle of Banias ; and now they have been hack- 
ing and chipping these old arches here that Jesus looked upon 
in the flesh. Heaven protect the Sepulchre when this tribe 
invades Jerusalem ! 

The ruins here are not very interesting. There are the 
massive walls of a great square building that was once the cit- 
adel ; there are many ponderous old arches that are so smoth- 
ered with debris that they barely project above the ground ; 
there are heavy-walled sewers through which the crystal brook 
of which Jordan is born still runs ; in the hill-side are the sub- 
structions of a costly marble temple that Herod the Great 
built here — patches of its handsome mosaic floors still remain ; 
there is a quaint old stone bridge that was here before Herod's 
time, may be ; scattered every where, in the paths and in the 
woods, are Corinthian capitals, broken porphyry pillars, and 
little fragments of sculpture ; and up yonder in the precipice 
where the fountain gushes out, are well-worn Greek inscrip- 
tions over niches in the rock where in ancient times the Greeks, 
and after them the Romans, worshipped the sylvan god Pan. 
But trees and bushes grow above many of these ruins now ; 
the miserable huts of a little crew of filthy Arabs are perched 
upon the broken masonry of antiquity, the whole place has a 
sleepy, stupid, rural look about it, and one can hardly bring 
himself to believe that a busy, substantially built city once ex- 
isted here, even two thousand years ago. The place was nev- 
ertheless the scene of an event whose effects have added page 
after page and volume after volume to the world's history. 
For in this place Christ stood when he said to Peter : 

"Thou art Peter; and upon this rock will I build my church, and the gates of 
hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the King- 



472 ON HOLY GROUND. 

dom of Heaven ; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in 
heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." 

On those little sentences have been built up the mighty edi- 
fice of the Church of Rome ; in them lie the authority for the 
imperial power of the Popes over temporal affairs, and their 
godlike power to curse a soul or wash it white from sin. To 
sustain the position of " the only true Church," which Borne 
claims was thus conferred upon her, she has fought and labored 
and struggled for many a century, and will continue to keep 
herself busy in the same work to the end of time. The mem- 
orable words I have quoted give to this ruined city about all 
the interest it possesses to people of the present day. 

It seems curious enough to us to be standing on ground that 
was once actually pressed by the feet of the Saviour. The 
situation is suggestive of a reality and a tangibility that seem 
at variance with the vagueness and mystery and ghostliness 
that one naturally attaches to the character of a god. I can 
not comprehend yet that I am sitting where a god has stood, 
and looking upon the brook and the mountains which that god 
looked upon, and am surrounded by dusky men and women 
whose ancestors saw him, and even talked with him, face to 
face, and carelessly, just as they would have done with any 
other stranger. I can not comprehend this ; the gods of my 
understanding have been always hidden in clouds and very far 
away. 

This morning, during breakfast, the usual assemblage of 
squalid humanity sat patiently without the charmed circle of 
the camp and waited for such crumbs as pity might bestow 
upon their misery. There were old and young, brown-skinned 
and yellow. Some of the men were tall and stalwart, (for one 
hardly sees any where such splendid-looking men as here in the 
East,) but all the women and children looked worn and sad, 
and distressed with hunger. They reminded me much of In- 
dians, did these people. They had but little clothing, but such 
as they had was fanciful in character and fantastic in its ar- 
rangement. Any little absurd gewgaw or gimcrack they had 
they disposed in such a way as to make it attract attention 



PECULIARITIES. 473 

most readily. They sat in silence, and with tireless patience 
watched our every motion with that vile, uncomplaining impo- 
liteness which is so truly Indian, and which makes a white 
man so nervous and uncomfortable and savage that he wants 
to exterminate the whole tribe. 

These people about us had other peculiarities, which I have 
noticed in the noble red man, too : they were infested with 
vermin, and the dirt had caked on them till it amounted to 
bark. 

The little children were in a pitiable condition — they all had 
sore eyes, and were otherwise afflicted in various ways. They 
say that hardly a native child in all the East is free from sore 
eyes, and that thousands of them go blind of one eye or both 
every year. I think this must be so, for I see plenty of blind 
people every day, and I do not remember seeing any children 
that hadn't sore eyes. And, would you suppose that an Amer- 
ican mother could sit for an hour, with her child in her arms, 
and let a hundred flies roost upon its eyes all that time undis- 
turbed? I see that every day. It makes my flesh creep. 
Yesterday we met a woman riding on a little jackass, and she 
had a little child in her arms ; honestly, I thought the child 
had goggles on as we approached, and I wondered how its 
mother could afford so much style. But when we drew near, 
we saw that the goggles were nothing but a camp meeting of 
flies assembled around each of the child's eyes, and at the 
same time there was a detachment prospecting its nose. The 
flies were happy, the child was contented, and so the mother 
did not interfere. 

As soon as the tribe found out that we had a doctor in our 
party, they began to flock in from all quarters. Dr. B., in the 
charity of his nature, had taken a child from a woman who 
sat near by, and put some sort of a wash upon its diseased 
eyes. That woman went off and started the whole nation, and 
it was a sight to see them swarm ! The lame, the halt, the 
blind, the leprous — all the distempers that are bred of indo- 
lence, dirt, and iniquity — were represented in the Congress in 
ten minutes, and still they came ! Every woman that had a 



474 



HEALING THE SICK. 



sick baby brought it along, and every woman that hadn't, bor- 
rowed one. What reverent and what worshiping looks they 
bent upon that dread, mysterious power, the Doctor ! They 
watched him take his phials out ; they watched him measure 
the particles of white powder ; they watched him add drops 
of one precious liquid, and drops of another ; they lost not the 
slightest movement ; their eyes were riveted upon him with a 




IMPROMPTU HOSPITAL. 



fascination that nothing could distract. I believe they thought 
he was gifted like a god. When each individual got his por- 
tion of medicine, his eyes were radiant with joy — notwith- 
standing by nature they are a thankless and impassive race — 
and upon his face was written the unquestioning faith that 
nothing on earth could prevent the patient from getting well 
now. 

Christ knew how to preach to these simple, superstitious, 
disease-tortured creatures : He healed the sick. They flocked 
to our poor human doctor this morning when the fame of what 
he had done to the sick child went abroad in the land, and 
they worshiped him with their eyes while they did not know 



THE PRINCESS. 475 

as yet whether there was virtue in his simples or not. The 
ancestors of these — people precisely like them in color, dress, 
manners, customs, simplicity — flocked in vast multitudes after 
Christ, and when they saw Him make the afflicted whole with 
a word, it is no wonder they worshiped Him. ]STo wonder 
His deeds were the talk of the nation. No wonder the multi- 
tude that followed Him was so great that at one time — thirty 
miles from here — they had to let a sick man down through the 
roof because no approach could be made to the door ; no won- 
der His audiences were so great at Galilee that He had to 
preach from a ship removed a little distance from the shore ; 
no wonder that even in the desert places about Bethsaida, five 
thousand invaded His solitude, and He had to feed them by a 
miracle or else see them suffer for their confiding faith and de- 
votion ; no wonder when there was a great commotion in a 
city in those days, one neighbor explained it to another in 
words to this effect : " They say that Jesus of Nazareth is 
come !" 

Well, as I was saying, the doctor distributed medicine as 
long as he had any to distribute, and his reputation is mighty 
in Galilee this day. Among his patients was the child of the 
Shiek's daughter — for even this poor, ragged handful of sores 
and sin has its royal Shiek — a poor old mummy that looked as 
if he would be more at home in a poor-house than in the Chief 
Magistracy of this tribe of hopeless, shirtless savages. The 
princess — I mean the Shiek's daughter — was only thirteen or 
fourteen years old, and had a very sweet face and a pretty one. 
She was the only Syrian female we have seen yet who was not 
so sinfully ugly that she couldn't smile after ten o'clock Satur- 
day night without breaking the Sabbath. Her child was a 
hard specimen, though — there wasn't enough of it to make a 
pie, and the poor little thing looked so pleadingly up at all 
who came near it (as if it had an idea that now was its chance 
or never,) that we were filled with compassion which was gen- 
nine and not put on. 

But this last new horse I have got is trying to break his 
neck over the tent-ropes, and I shall have to go out and anchor 



476 



A NOBLE RUIN. 




THE HORSE " BAALBEO 



him. Jericho and I have parted company. The new horse is 
not much to boast of, I think. One of his hind legs bends the 
wrong way, and the other one is as straight and stiff as a tent- 
pole. Most 
of his teeth 
are gone, 
and he is as 
blind as a 
bat. His 
nose has 
been broken 
at some time 
or other, and 
is arched 
like a cul- 
vert now. 
His under 
lip hangs 

down like a camel's, and his ears are chopped off close to his 
head. I had some trouble at first to find a name for him, but 
I finally concluded to call him Baalbec, because he is such a 
magnificent ruin. I can not keep from talking aboul" my 
horses, because I have a very long and tedious journey before 
me, and they naturally occupy my thoughts about as much as 
matters of apparently much greater importance. 

We satisfied our pilgrims by making those hard rides from 
Baalbec to Damascus, but Dan's horse and Jack's were so crip- 
pled we had to leave them behind and get fresh animals for 
them. The dragoman says Jack's horse died. I swapped 
horses with Mohammed, the kingly-looking Egyptian who is 
our Ferguson's lieutenant. By Ferguson I mean our dragoman 
Abraham, of course. I did not take this horse on account of 
his personal appearance, but because I have not seen his back. 
I do not wish to see it. I have seen the backs of all the other 
horses, and found most of them covered with dreadful saddle^ 
boils which I know have not been washed or doctored for 
years. The idea of riding all day long over such ghastly in- 



MORE SENTIMENTAL BOSH. 477 

quisitions of torture is sickening. My horse must be like the 
others, but I have at least the consolation of not knowing it 
to be so. 

I hope that in future I may be spared any more sentimental 
praises of the Arab's idolatry of his horse. In boyhood I 
longed to be an Arab of the desert and have a beautiful mare, 
and call her Selim or Benjamin or Mohammed, and feed her 
with my own hands, and let her come into the tent, and teach 
her to caress me and look fondly upon me with her great ten- 
der eyes ; and I wished that a stranger might come at such a 
time and offer me a hundred thousand dollars for her, so that 
I could do like the other Arabs — hesitate, yearn for the money, 
but overcome by my love for my mare, at last say, " Part with 
thee, my beautiful one ! Never with my life ! Away, tempt- 
er, I scorn thy gold !" and then bound into the saddle and 
speed over the desert like the wind ! 

But I recall those aspirations. If these Arabs be like the 
other Arabs, their love for their beautiful mares is a fraud. 
These of my acquaintance have no love for their horses, no 
sentiment of pity for them, and no knowledge of how to treat 
them or care for them. The Syrian saddle-blanket is a quilted 
mattrass two or three inches thick. It is never removed from 
the horse, day or night. It gets full of dirt and hair, and be- 
comes soaked with sweat. It is bound to breed sores. These 
pirates never think of washing a horse's back. They do not 
shelter the horses in the tents, either ; they must stay out and 
take the weather as it comes. Look at poor cropped and dilap- 
idated " Baalbec," and weep for the sentiment that has been 
wasted upon the Selims of romance ! 



OHAPTEE XLYI. 

ABOUT an hour's ride over a rough, rocky road, half 
flooded with water, and through a forest of oaks of 
Bashan, brought us to Dan. 

From a little mound here in the plain issues a broad stream 
of limpid water and forms a large shallow pool, and then 
rushes furiously onward, augmented in volume. This puddle 
is an important source of the Jordan. Its banks, and those of 
the brook are respectably adorned with blooming oleanders, 
but the unutterable beauty of the spot will not throw a well- 
balanced man into convulsions, as the Syrian books of travel 
would lead one to suppose. 

From the spot I am speaking of, a cannon-ball would carry 
beyond the confines of Holy Land and light upon profane 
ground three miles away. We were only one little hour's 
travel within the borders of Holy Land — we had hardly begun 
to appreciate yet that we were standing upon any different 
sort of earth than that we had always been used to, and yet 
see how the historic names began already to cluster ! Dan — 
Bashan — Lake Huleh — the Sources of Jordan — the Sea of 
Galilee. They were all in sight but the last, and it was not 
far away. The little township of Bashan was once the kingdom 
so famous in Scripture for its bulls and its oaks. Lake Huleh 
is the Biblical " Waters of Merom." Dan was the northern 
and Beersheba the southern limit of Palestine — hence the 
expression " from Dan to Beersheba." It is equivalent to our 
phrases " from Maine to Texas " — " from Baltimore to San 
Francisco." Our expression and that of the Israelites both 



SMALLNESS OF PALESTINE. 



479 




OAK OP BASHAN. 



mean the same — great distance. With their slow camels and 
asses, it was about a seven days' journey from Dan to Beer- 
sheba — say a hundred and fifty or sixty miles — it was the 
entire length 
of their coun- 
try, and was 
not to be un- 
dertaken 
without great 
preparation 
and much cer- 
emony. When 
the Prodigal 
traveled to " a 
far country," 
it is not likely 
that he went 
more than 

eighty or ninety miles. Palestine is only from forty to sixty 
miles wide. The State of Missouri could be split into three 
Palestines, and there would then be enough material left for 
part of another — possibly a whole one. From Baltimore to 
San Francisco is several thousand miles, but it will be only a 
seven days' journey in the cars when I am two or three years 
older.* If I live I shall necessarily have to go across the con- 
tinent every now and then in those cars, but one journey from 
Dan to Beersheba will be sufficient, no doubt. It must be the 
most trying of the two. Therefore, if we chance to discover 
that from Dan to Beersheba seemed a mighty stretch of coun- 
try to the Israelites, let us not be airy with them, but reflect 
that it was and is a mighty stretch when one can not traverse 
it by rail. 

The small mound I have mentioned a while ago was once 
occupied by the Phenician city of Laish. A party of filibus- 
ters from Zorah and Eschol captured the place, and lived there 



* The railroad has been completed, since the above was written. 



480 REMINISCENCE OF LOT. 

in a free and easy way, worshiping gods of their own manu- 
facture and stealing idols from their neighbors whenever they 
wore their own out. Jeroboam set up a golden calf here to 
fascinate his people and keep them from making dangerous 
trips to Jerusalem to worship, which might result in a return to 
their rightful allegiance. With all respect for those ancient 
Israelites, I can not overlook the fact that they were not 
always virtuous enough to withstand the seductions of a 
golden calf. Human nature has not changed much since 
then. 

Some forty centuries ago the city of Sodom was pillaged by 
the Arab princes of Mesopotamia, and among other prisoners 
they seized upon the patriarch Lot and brought him here on 
their way to their own possessions. They brought him to 
Dan, and father Abraham, who was pursuing them, crept 
softly in at dead of night, among the whispering oleanders 
and under the shadows of the stately oaks, and fell upon the 
slumbering victors and startled them from their dreams with 
the clash of steel. He recaptured Lot and all the other 
plunder. 

We moved on. We were now in a green valley, five or six 
miles wide and fifteen long. The streams which are called 
the sources of the Jordan flow through it to Lake Huleh, a 
shallow pond three miles in diameter, and from the southern 
extremity of the Lake the concentrated Jordan flows out. 
The Lake is surrounded by a broad marsh, grown with reeds. 
Between the marsh and the mountains which wall the valley 
is a respectable strip of fertile land ; at the end of the valley, 
toward Dan, as much as half the land is solid and fertile, and 
watered by Jordan's sources. There is enough of it to make a 
farm. It almost warrants the enthusiasm of the spies of that 
rabble of adventurers who captured Dan. They said : " We 
have seen the land, and behold it is very good. * * * A 
place where there is no want of any thing that is in the 
earth." 

Their enthusiasm was at least warranted by the fact that 
they had never seen a country as good as this. There was 



JOSEPH RESURRECTED. 481 

enough of it for the ample support of their six hundred men 
and their families, too. 

When we got fairly down on the level part of the Danite 
farm, we came to places where we could actually run our 
horses. It was a notable circumstance. 

We had been painfully clambering over interminable hills 
and rocks for days together, and when we suddenly came 
upon this astonishing piece of rockless plain, every man drove 
the spurs into his horse and sped away with a velocity he 
could surely enjoy to the utmost, but could never hope to 
comprehend in Syria. 

Here were evidences of cultivation — a rare sight in this 
country — an acre or two of rich soil studded with last season's 
dead corn-stalks of the thickness of your thumb and very wide 
apart. But in such a land it was a thrilling spectacle. Close 
to it was a stream, and on its banks a great herd of curious- 
looking Syrian goats and sheep were gratefully eating gravel. 
I do not state this as a petrified fact — I only suppose they were 
eating gravel, because there did not appear to be any thing 
else for them to eat. The shepherds that tended them were 
the very pictures of Joseph and his brethren I have no doubt 
in the world. They were tall, muscular, and very dark- 
skinned Bedouins, with inky black beards. They had firm 
lips, unquailing eyes, and a kingly stateliness of bearing. 
They wore the parti-colored half bonnet, half hood, with 
fringed ends falling upon their shoulders, and the full, flowing 
robe barred with broad black stripes — the dress one sees in all 
pictures of the swarthy sons of the desert. These chaps would 
sell their younger brothers if they had a chance, I think. 
They have the manners, the customs, the dress, the occupation 
and the loose principles of the ancient stock. [They attacked 
our camp last night, and I bear them no good will.] They 
had with them the pigmy jackasses one sees all over Syria and 
remembers in all pictures of the " Flight into Egypt," where 
Mary and the Young Child are riding and Joseph is walking 
alongside, towering high above the little donkey's shoulders. 

But really, here the man rides and carries the child, as a 

31 



482 



A WEARY LAND, 



general thing, and the woman walks. The customs have not 
changed since Joseph's time. We would not have in our 
houses a picture representing Joseph riding and Mary walk- 
ing ; we would see profanation in it, but a Syrian Christian 
would not. I know that hereafter the picture I first spoke of 
will look odd to me. 

We could not stop to rest two or three hours out from our 
camp, of course, albeit the brook was beside us. So we went 
on an hour longer. We saw water, then, but nowhere in all 
the waste around was there a foot of shade, and we were 
scorching to death. " Like unto the shadow of a great rock 
in a weary land." Nothing in the Bible is more beautiful 
than that, and surely there is no place we have wandered to 
that is able to give it such touching expression as this blister- 
ing, naked, treeless land. 

Here you do not stop just when you please, but when you 

can. We found water, but no 
shade. We traveled on and found 
a tree at last, but no water. We 
rested and lunched, and came on 
to this place, Ain Mellahah (the 
boys call it Baldwinsville.) It 
was a very short day's run, but 
the dragoman does not want to 
go further, and has invented a 
plausible lie about the country 
beyond this being infested by fe- 
rocious Arabs, who would make 
sleeping in their midst a danger- 
ous pastime. Well, they ought 
to be dangerous. They carry a 
rusty old weather-beaten flint- 
lock gun, with a barrel that is 
longer than themselves ; it has no sights on it ; it will not 
carry farther than a brickbat, and is not haif so certain. And 
the great sash they wear in many a fold around their waists 
has two or three absurd old horse-pistob in it that are rustj 




DANGEROUS ARAB. 



MR. GRIMES' BEDOUINS. 



483 



from eternal disuse — weapons that would hang fire just about 
long enough for you to walk out of range, and then burst and 
blow the Arab's head off. Exceedingly dangerous these sons 
of the desert are. 

It used to make my blood run cold to read fm. C. Grimes' 
hairbreadth escapes from Bedouins, but I think I could read 
them now without a tremor. He never said he was attacked 
by Bedouins, I believe, or was ever treated uncivilly, but then 
in about every other chapter he discovered them approaching, 
any how, and he had a blood-curdling fashion of working up 
the peril ; and of wondering how his relations far away would 
feel could they see their poor wandering boy, with his weary 
feet and his dim eyes, in such fearful danger ; and of thinking 
for the last time of the old homestead, and the dear old church, 
and the cow, and those things ; and of finally straightening his 




GRIMES ON THE WAR PATH. 



form to its utmost height in the saddle, drawing his trusty 
revolver, and then dashing the spurs into " Mohammed " and 
sweeping down upon the ferocious enemy determined to sell 
his life as dearly as possible. True the Bedouins never did 
any thing to him when he arrived, and never had any intention 
of doing any thing to him in the first place, and wondered 



484 MEMORIES OF JOSHUA. 

what in the mischief he was making all that to-do abont ; but 
still I conld not divest myself of the idea, somehow, that a 
frightful peril had been escaped through that man's dare-devil 
bravery, and so I never could read about ¥m. C. Grimes' 
Bedouins and sleep comfortably afterward. But I believe the 
Bedouins to be a fraud, now. I have seen the monster, and I 
can outrun him. I shall never be afraid of his daring to stand 
behind his own gun and discharge it. 

About fifteen hundred years before Christ, this camp-ground 
of ours by the Waters of Merom was the scene of one of 
Joshua's exterminating battles. Jabin, King of Hazor, (up 
yonder above Dan,) called all the shieks about him together, 
with their hosts, to make ready for Israel's terrible General 
who was approaching. 

" And when all these Kings were met together, they came and pitched together 
by the Waters of Merom, to fight against Israel. 

" And they went out, they and all their hosts with them, much people, even a* 
the sand that is upon the sea-shore for multitude," etc. 

But Joshua fell upon them and utterly destroyed them, root 
and branch. That was his usual policy in war. He never left 
any chance for newspaper controversies about who won the 
battle. He made this valley, so quiet now, a reeking 
slaughter-pen. 

Somewhere in this part of the country — I do not know ex- 
actly where — Israel fought another bloody battle a hundred 
years later. Deborah, the prophetess, told Barak to take ten 
thousand men and sally forth against another King Jabin who 
had been doing something. Barak came down from Mount 
Tabor, twenty or twenty-five miles from here, and gave battle 
to Jabin's forces, who were in command of Sisera. Barak won 
the fight, and while he was making the victory complete by 
the usual method of exterminating the remnant of the defeated 
host, Sisera fled away on foot, and when he was nearly ex- 
hausted by fatigue and thirst, one Jael, a woman he seems to 
have been acquainted with, invited him to come into her tent 
and rest himself. The weary soldier acceded readily enough, 



FULFILLMENT OF PROPHECY. 485 

and Jael put him to bed. He said he was very thirsty, and 
asked his generous preserver to get him a cup of water. She 
brought him some milk, and he drank of it gratefully and lay 
down again, to forget in pleasant dreams his lost battle and 
his humbled pride. Presently when he was asleep she came 
softly in with a hammer and drove a hideous tent-pen down 
through his brain ! 

" For he was fast asleep and weary. So he died." Such is 
the touching language of the Bible. " The Song of Deborah 
and Barak " praises Jael for the memorable service she had 
rendered, in an exultant strain : 

" Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be, blessed shall 
she be above women in the tent. 

" He asked for water, and she gave him milk ; she brought forth butter in a 
lordly dish. 

" She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workman's hammer ; 
and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head when she had 
pierced and stricken through his temples. 

"At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell: 
where he bowed, there he fell down dead." 

Stirring scenes like these occur in this valley no more. 
There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent — 
not for thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three 
small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent 
habitation. One may ride ten miles, hereabouts, and not see 
ten human beings. 

To this region one of the prophecies is applied : 

I will bring the land into desolation ; and your enemies which dwell therein 
shall be astonished at it. And I will scatter you among the heathen, and I will 
draw out a sword after you ; and your land shall be desolate and your cities 
waste." 

No man can stand here by deserted Ain Mellahah and say 
the prophecy has not been fulfilled. 

In a verse from the Bible which I have quoted above, occurs 
the phrase " all these kings." It attracted my attention in a 
moment, because it carries to my mind such a vastly different 



486 BEGINNING TO UNLEARN. 

significance from what it always did at home. I can see easily 
enough that if I wish to profit by this tour and come to a cor- 
rect understanding of the matters of interest connected with 
it, I must studiously and faithfully unlearn a great many- 
things I have somehow absorbed concerning Palestine. I 
must begin a system of reduction. Like my grapes which the 
spies bore out of the Promised Land, I have got every thing in 
Palestine on too large a scale. Some of my ideas were wild 
enough. The word Palestine always brought to my mind a 
vague suggestion of a country as large as the United States. 
I do not know why, but such was the case. I suppose it wai 
because I could not conceive of a small country having s« 
large a history. I think I was a little surprised to find that 
the grand Sultan of Turkey was a man of only ordinary size. 
I must try to reduce my ideas of Palestine to a more reason- 
able shape. One gets large impressions in boyhood, some- 
times, which he has to fight against all his life. " All these 
kings." When I used to read that in Sunday School, it sug- 
gested to me the several kings of such countries as England, 
France, Spain, Germany, Russia, etc., arrayed in splendid 
robes ablaze with jewels, marching in grave procession, with 
sceptres of gold in their hands and flashing crowns upon their 
heads. But here in Ain Mellahah, after coming through 
Syria, and after giving serious study to the character and cus- 
toms of the country, the phrase " all these kings " loses it* 
grandeur. It suggests only a parcel of petty chiefs— ill-clad 
and ill-conditioned savages much like our Indians, who lived 
in full sight of each other and whose " kingdoms " were large 
when they were five miles square and contained two thousand 
souls. The combined monarchies of the thirty " kings " de- 
stroyed by Joshua on one of his famous campaigns, only cov- 
ered an area about equal to four of our counties of ordinary- 
size. The poor old sheik we saw at Cesarea Philippi with his 
ragged band of a hundred followers, would have been called a 
* ' king " in those ancient times. 

It is seven in the morning, and as we are in the country, 
the grass ought to be sparkling with dew, the flowers enrich^ 



DESOLATION OF THE LAND. 487 

frig the air with their fragrance, and the birds singing in the 
trees. But alas, there is no dew here, nor flowers, nor birds, 
nor trees. There is a plain and an unshaded lake, and beyond 
them some barren mountains. The tents are tumbling, the 
Arabs are quarreling like dogs and cats, as usual, the camp- 
ground is strewn with packages and bundles, the labor of 
packing them upon the backs of the mules is progressing with 
great activity, the horses are saddled, the umbrellas are out, 
and in ten minutes we shall mount and the long procession 
will move again. The white city of the Mellahah, resurrected 
for a moment out of the dead centuries, will have disappeared 
again and left no sign. 




CHAPTEE XLYII. 

"TT7~E traversed some miles of desolate country whose soil 

▼ ▼ is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds — a 
silent, mournful expanse, wherein we saw only three persons 
— Arabs, with nothing on but a long coarse shirt like the 
" tow-linen " shirts which used to form the only summer gar- 
ment of little negro boys on Southern plantations. Shepherds 
they were, and they charmed their flocks with the traditional 
shepherd's pipe — a reed instrument that made music as ex- 
quisitely infernal as these same Arabs create when they sing. 

In their pipes lingered no echo of the wonderful music the 
shepherd forefathers heard in the Plains of Bethlehem what 
time the angels sang " Peace on earth, good will to men." 

Part of the ground we came over was not ground at all, but 
rocks — cream-colored rocks, worn smooth, as if by water ; with 
seldom an edge or a corner on them, but scooped out, honey- 
combed, bored out with eye-holes, and thus wrought into all 
manner of quaint shapes, among which the uncouth imitation 
of skulls was frequent. Over this part of the route were occa- 
sional remains of an old Roman road like the Appian Way, 
whose paving-stones still clung to their places with Poman 
tenacity. 

Gray lizards, those heirs of ruin, of sepulchres and desola- 
tion, glided in and out among the rocks or lay still and sunned 
themselves. "Where prosperity has reigned, and fallen ; where 
glory has flamed, and gone out ; where beauty has dwelt, and 
passed away ; where gladness was, and sorrow is ; where the 
pomp of life has been, and silence and death brood in its high 



JACK'S ADVENTURE 



489 



places, there this reptile makes Lis home, and mocks at human 
vanity. His coat is the color of ashes : and ashes are the 
symbol of hopes that have perished, of aspirations that came 
to nought, of loves that are buried. If he could speak, he 
would say, Build temples : I will lord it in their ruins ; build 
palaces : I will inhabit them ; erect empires : I will inherit 




HOUSE OF ANCIENT POMP. 



them ; bury your beautiful : I will watch the worms at their 
work ; and you, who stand here and moralize over me : I will 
crawl over your corpse at the last. 

A few ants were in this desert place, but merely to spend 
the summer. They brought their provisions from Ain Mel- 
lahah — eleven miles. 

Jack is not very well to-day, it is easy to see ; but boy as he 
is, he is too much of a man to speak of it. He exposed him- 
self to the sun too much yesterday, but since it came of his 
earnest desire to learn, and to make this journey as useful as 
the opportunities will allow, no one seeks to discourage him 
by fault-finding. "We missed him an hour from the camp, and 
then found him some distance away, by the edge of a brook, 



490 



JACKS ADVENTURE. 



and with no umbrella to protect him from the fierce sun. If 
he had been nsed to going without his umbrella, it would have 
been well enough, of course ; but he was not. He was just in 

the act of throwing a 
clod at a mud-turtle 
which was sunning it- 
self on a small log in 
the brook. We said : 

" Don't do that, Jack. 
What do you want to 
harm him for? What 
has he done ?" 

" Well, then, I won't 
kill him, but I ought to, 
because he is a fraud." 

We asked him why, 
but he said it was no 
matter. We asked him 
why, once or twice, as 
jack. we walked back to the 

camp, but he still said 
it was no matter. But late at night, when he was sitting in a 
thoughtful mood on the bed, we asked him again and he said : 
" Well, it don't matter ; I don't mind it now, but I did not 
like it to-day, you know, because I don't tell any thing that 
isn't so, and I don't think the Colonel ought to, either. But 
he did ; he told us at prayers in the Pilgrims' tent, last night, 
and he seemed as if he was reading it out of the Bible, too, 
about this country flowing with milk and honey, and about the 
voice of the turtle being heard in the land. I thought that 
was drawing it a little strong, about the turtles, anyhow, but 
I asked Mr. Church if it was so, and he said it was, and what 
Mr. Church tells me, I believe. But I sat there and watched 
that turtle nearly an hour to-day, and I almost burned up in 
the sun ; but I never heard him sing. I believe I sweated a 
double handful of sweat — I know I did — because it got in mj 
eyes, and it was running down over my nose all the time ; and 




JACK'S ADVENTURE. 



491 



you know my pants are tighter than any body else's — Paris 
foolishness — and the buckskin seat of them got wet with sweat, 
and then got dry again and began to draw up and pinch and 
tear loose — it was awful — but I never heard him sing. Fi- 
nally I said, This is a fraud — that is what it is, it is a fraud — 
and if I had had any sense I might have known a cursed mud- 
turtle couldn't sing. And then I said, I don't wish to be hard 
on this fellow, and I will just give him ten minutes to com- 
mence ; ten minutes — and then if he don't, down goes his 
building. But he didn't commence, you know. I had staid 




A DISAPPOINTED AUDIENCE. 



there all that time, thinking may be he might, pretty soon, 
because he kept on raising his head up and letting it down, 
*and drawing the skin over his eyes for a minute and then 
opening them out again, as if he was trying to study up some- 
thing to sing, but just as the ten minutes were up and I was 
all beat out and blistered, he laid his blamed head down on a 
knot and went fast asleep." 

" It was a little hard, after yon had waited so long." 

" I should think so. I said, Well, if you won't sing, you 



492 JOSEPH'S PIT. 

shan't sleep, any way ; and if you fellows had let me alone I 
would have made him shin out of Galilee quicker than any 
turtle ever did yet. But it isn't any matter now — let it go. 
The skin is all off the back of my neck." 

About ten in the morning we halted at Joseph's Pit. This 
is a ruined Khan of the Middle Ages, in one of whose side 
courts is a great walled and arched pit with water in it, and 
this pit, one tradition says, is the one Joseph's brethren cast 
him into. A more authentic tradition, aided by the geography 
of the country, places the pit in Dothan, some two days' jour- 
ney from here. However, since there are many who believe 
in this present pit as the true one, it has its interest. 

It is hard to make a choice of the most beautiful passage in 
a book which is so gemmed with beautiful passages as the 
Bible ; but it is certain that not many things within its lids 
may take rank above the exquisite story of Joseph. Who 
taught those ancient writers their simplicity of language, their 
felicity of expression, their pathos, and above all, their faculty 
of sinking themselves entirely out of sight of the reader and 
making the narrative stand out alone and seem to tell itself? 
Shakspeare is always present when one reads his book ; Ma- 
caulay is present when we follow the march of his stately sen- 
tences ; but the Old Testament writers are hidden from view. 

If the pit I have been speaking of is the right one, a scene 
transpired there, long ages ago, which is familiar to us all in 
pictures. The sons of Jacob had been pasturing their flocks 
near there. Their father grew uneasy at their long absence, 
and sent Joseph, his favorite, to see if any thing had gone 
wrong with them. He traveled six or seven days' journey; he 
was only seventeen years old, and, boy like, he toiled through 
that long stretch of the vilest, rockiest, dustiest country in 
Asia, arrayed in the pride of his heart, his beautiful claw- 
hammer coat of many colors. Joseph was the favorite, and 
that was one crime in the eyes of his brethren ; he had 
dreamed dreams, and interpreted them to foreshadow his ele- 
vation far above all his family in the far future, and that was 
another ; he was dressed well and had doubtless displayed the 



JOSEPH'S MAGNANIMITY AND 

harmless vanity of youth in keeping the fact prominently be- 
fore his brothers. These were crimes his elders fretted over 
among themselves and proposed to punish when the opportu- 
nity should offer. When they saw him coming up from the 
Sea of Galilee, they recognized him and were glad. They said, 
" Lo, here is this dreamer — let us kill him." But Reuben 
pleaded for his life, and they spared it. But they seized the 
boy, and stripped the hated coat from his back and pushed 
him into the pit. They intended to let him die there, but 
Reuben intended to liberate him secretly. However, while 
Reuben was away for a little while, the brethren sold Joseph 
to some Ishmaelitish merchants who were journeying towards 
Egypt. Such is the history of the pit. And the self-same pit 
is there in that place, even to this day ; and there it will re- 
main until the next detachment of image-breakers and tomb- 
desecraters arrives from the Quaker City excursion, and they 
will infallibly dig it up and carry it away with them. For 
behold in them is no reverence for the solemn monuments of 
the past, and whithersoever they go they destroy and spare 
not. 

Joseph became rich, distinguished, powerful — as the Bible 
expresses it, " lord over all the land of Egypt." Joseph was 
the real king, the strength, the brain of the monarchy, though 
Pharaoh held the title. Joseph is one of the truly great men 
of the Old Testament. And he was the noblest and the man- 
liest, save Esau. Why shall we not say a good word for the 
princely Bedouin? The only crime that can be brought 
against him is that he was unfortunate. Why must every body 
praise Joseph's great-hearted generosity to his cruel brethren, 
without stint of fervent language, and fling only a reluctant 
bone of praise to Esau for his still sublimer generosity to the 
brother who had wronged him ? Jacob took advantage of 
Esau's consuming hunger to rob him of his birthright and the 
great honor and consideration that belonged to the position ; 
by treachery and falsehood he robbed him of his father's bless- 
ing ; he made of him a stranger in his home, and a wanderer. 
Yet after twenty years had passed away and Jacob met Esau 



494 THE SACRED LAKE OF GENESSARET. 

and fell at his feet quaking with fear and begging piteously t« 
be spared the punishment he knew he deserved, what did that 
magnificent savage do ? He fell upon his neck and embraced 
him ! When Jacob — who was incapable of comprehending 
nobility of character — still doubting, still fearing, insisted 
upon " finding grace with my lord " by the bribe of a present 
of cattle, what did the gorgeous son of the desert say ? 

"Nay, I have enough, my brother; keep that thou hast unto 
thyself!" 

Esau found Jacob rich, beloved .by wives and children, and 
traveling in state, with servants, herds of cattle and trains of 
camels — but he himself was still the uncourted outcast this 
brother had made him. After thirteen years of romantic mys- 
tery, the brethren who had wronged Joseph, came, strangers 
in a strange land, hungry and humble, to buy " a little food ;'" 
and being summoned to a palace, charged with crime, they 
beheld in its owner their wronged brother ; they were trem- 
bling beggars — he, the lord of a mighty empire ! What Jo- 
seph that ever lived would have thrown away such a chance 
to " show off?" Who stands first — outcast Esau forgiving 
Jacob in prosperity, or Joseph on a king's throne forgiving the 
ragged tremblers whose happy rascality placed him there ? 

Just before we came to Joseph's Pit, we had "raised" a hill, 
and there, a few miles before us, with not a tree or a shrub te 
interrupt the view, lay a vision which millions of worshipers 
in the far lands of the earth would give half their possessions 
to see — the sacred Sea of Galilee ! 

Therefore we tarried only a short time at the pit. We 
rested the horses and ourselves, and felt for a few minutes the 
blessed shade of the ancient buildings. We were out of water, 
but the two or three scowling Arabs, with their long guns, 
who were idling about the place, said they had none and that 
there was none in the vicinity. They knew there was a little 
brackish water in the pit, but they venerated a place made 
sacred by their ancestor's imprisonment too much to be willing 
to see Christian dogs drink from it. But Ferguson tied rags 
and handkerchiefs together till he made a rope long enough to 



PILGRIM ENTHUSIASM 



195 



lower a vessel to the bottom, and we drank and then rode on ; 
and in a short time we dismounted on those shores which the 
feet of the Saviour have made holy ground. 

At noon we took a swim in the Sea of Galilee — a blessed 
privilege in this roasting climate — and then lunched under a 
neglected old fig-tree at the fountain they call Ain-et-Tin, a^ 
hundred yards from ruined Capernaum. Every rivulet that 
gurgles out of the rocks and sands of this part of the world is 
dubbed with the title of " fountain," and people familiar with 
the Hudson, the great lakes and the Mississippi fall into trans- 
ports of admiration over them, and exhaust their powers of 
composition in 
writing their 
praises. If all 
the poetry and 
nonsense that 
have been dis- 
charged upon 
the fountains 
and the bland 
ecenery of this 
region were 
collected in a 
book, it would 
make a most 
valuable vol- 
ume to burn. 

D u r 
luncheon, 
pilgrim enthu- 
siasts of our 
party, who had 
been so light- 
hearted and 

happy ever since they touched holy ground that they did little 
but mutter incoherent rhapsodies, could scarcely eat, so anx- 
ious were they to " take shipping " and sail in very persou 



nig 

the 




FIG TREE. 



496 PILGRIM ENTHUSIASM. 

upon the waters that had borne the vessels of the Apostk*. 
Their anxiety grew and their excitement augmented with 
every fleeting moment, until my fears were aroused and I be- 
gan to have misgivings that in their present condition they 
might break recklessly loose from all considerations of pru- 
dence and buy a whole fleet of ships to sail in instead of hiring 
a single one for an hour, as quiet folk are wont to do. I trem- 
bled to think of the ruined purses this day's performances 
might result in. I could not help reflecting bodingly upon the 
intemperate zeal with which middle-aged men are apt to sur- 
feit themselves upon a seductive folly which they have tasted 
for the first time. And yet I did not feel that I had a right 
to be surprised at the state of things which was giving me so 
much concern. These men had been taught from infancy to 
revere, almost to worship, the holy places whereon their happy 
eyes were resting now. For many and many a year this very 
picture had visited their thoughts by day and floated through 
their dreams by night. To stand before it in the flesh — to see 
it as they saw it now — to sail upon the hallowed sea, and kiss 
the holy soil that compassed it about : these were aspirations 
they had cherished while a generation dragged its lagging sea- 
sons by and left its furrows in their faces and its frosts upon 
their hair. To look upon this picture, and sail upon this sea, 
they had forsaken home and its idols and journeyed thousands 
and thousands of miles, in weariness and tribulation. What 
wonder that the sordid lights of work-day prudence should 
pale before the glory of a hope like theirs in the full splendor 
of its fruition ? Let them squander millions ! I said — who 
speaks of money at a time like this ? 

In this frame of mind I followed, as fast as I could, the 
•eager footsteps of the pilgrims, and stood upon the shore of the 
lake, and swelled, with hat and voice, the frantic hail they 
sent after the " ship " that was speeding by. It was a success. 
The toilers of the sea ran in and beached their barque. Joy 
sat upon every countenance. 

" How much ? — ask him how much, Ferguson ! — how much 
to take us all — eight of us, and you — to Bethsaida, yonder, 



WHY WE DID NOT SAIL ON GALILEE. 



497 



and to the mouth of Jordan, and to the place where the swine 
ran down into the sea — quick ! — and Ave want to coast around 
every where — every where ! — all day long ! — / could sail a year 
in these waters ! — and tell him we'll stop at Magdala and fin- 
ish at Tiberias ! — ask him how much ? — any thing — any thing 
whatever ! — tell him we don't care what the expense is !" [I 
said to myself, I knew how it would be.] 

Ferguson — (interpreting) — " He says two Napoleons — eight 
dollars." 

One or two countenances fell. Then a pause. 

" Too much ! — we'll give him one !" 

I never shall know how it was — I shudder yet when I think 
how the place is given to miracles — but in a single instant of 




FAKE TOO HIGH. 



time, as it seemed to me, that ship was twenty paces from the 
shore, and speeding away like a frightened thing ! 



Eight crest- 
fallen creatures stood upon the shore, and O, to think of it ! 



this — this- 



ful, shameful ending, 



after all that overmastering ecstacy ! Oh, shame- 
after such unseemly boasting 1 It was 
32 



498 WHY WE DID NOT SAIL ON GALILEE. 

too much like " Ho ! let me at him !" followed by a prudent 
" Two of you hold him — one can hold me !" 

Instantly there was wailing and gnashing of teeth in the 
camp. The two Napoleons were offered — more if necessary — 
and pilgrims and dragoman shouted themselves hoarse with 
pleadings to the retreating boatmen to come back. But they 
sailed serenely away and paid no further heed to pilgrims who 
had dreamed all their lives of some day skimming over the 
sacred waters of Galilee and listening to its hallowed story in 
the whisperings of its waves, and had journeyed countless 
leagues to do it, and — and then concluded that the fare was 
too high. Impertinent Mohammedan Arabs, to think such 
things of gentlemen of another faith ! 

Well, there was nothing to do but just submit and forego 
the privilege of voyaging on Genessaret, after coming half 
around the globe to taste that pleasure. There was a time, 
when the Saviour taught here, that boats were plenty among 
the fishermen of the coasts — but boats and fishermen both are 
gone, now ; and old Josephus had a fleet of men-of-war in 
these waters eighteen centuries ago — a hundred and thirty 
bold canoes — but they, also, have passed away and left no sign. 
They battle here no more by sea, and the commercial marine 
of Galilee numbers only two small ships, just of a pattern 
with the little skiffs the disciples knew. One was lost to us 
for good — the other was miles away and far out of hail. So 
we mounted the horses and rode grimly on toward Magdala, 
cantering along in the edge of the water for want of the means 
of passing over it 

How the pilgrims abused each other ! Each said it was the 
other's fault, and each in turn denied it. No word was spoken 
by the sinners — even the mildest sarcasm might have been 
dangerous at such a time. Sinners that have been kept down 
and had examples held up to them, and suffered frequent lec- 
tures, and been so put upon in a moral way and in the matter 
of going slow and being serious and bottling up slang, and so 
crowded in regard to the matter of being proper and always 
and forever behaving, that their lives have become a burden 



ABOUT CAPERNAUM. 499 

U. them, would not lag behind pilgrims at such a time as this, 
and wink furtively, and be joyful, and commit other such 
crimes — because it would not occur to them to do it. Otherwise 
they would. But they did do it, though — and it did them a 
world of good to hear the pilgrims abuse each other, too. We 
took an unworthy satisfaction in seeing them fall out, now and 
then, because it showed that they were only poor human peo- 
ple like us, after all. 

So we all rode down to Magdala, while the gnashing of 
teeth waxed and waned by turns, and harsh words troubled 
the holy calm of Galilee. 

Lest any man think I mean to be ill-natured when I talk 
about our pilgrims as I have been talking, I wish to say in all 
sincerity that I do not. I would not listen to lectures from 
men I did not like and could not respect ; and none of these 
can say I ever took their lectures unkindly, or was restive un- 
der the infliction, or failed to try to profit by what they said to 
me. They are better men than I am ; I can say that honest- 
ly ; they are good friends of mine, too — and besides, if they 
did not wish to be stirred up occasionally in print, why in the 
mischief did they travel with me? They knew me. They 
knew my liberal way — that I like to give and take — when it 
is for me to give and other people to take. When one of 
them threatened to leave me in Damascus when I had the 
cholera, he had no real idea of doing it — I know his pas- 
sionate nature and the good impulses that underlie it. And 
did I not overhear Church, another pilgrim, say he did not 
care who went or who staid, he would stand by me till I 
walked out of Damascus on my own feet or was carried out in 
a coffin, if it was a year ? And do I not include Church every 
time I abuse the pilgrims — and would I be likely to speak ill- 
naturedly of him ? I wish to stir then* up and make them 
healthy ; that is all. 

We had left Capernaum behind us. It was only a shapeless 
ruin. It bore no semblance to a town, and had nothing about 
it to suggest that it had ever been a town. But all desolate 
and unpeopled as it was, it was illustrious ground. From it 



500 ABOUT CAPERNAUM. 

sprang that tree of Christianity whose broad arms overshadow 
so many distant lands to-day. After Christ was tempted of 
the devil in the desert, he came here and began his teachings ; 
and during the three or four years he lived afterward, this 
place was his home almost altogether. Pie began to heal the 
sick, and his fame soon spread so widely that sufferers came 
from Syria and beyond Jordan, and even from Jerusalem, sev- 
eral days' journey away, to be cured of their diseases. Here 
he healed the centurion's servant and Peter's mother-in-law, 
and multitudes of the lame and the blind and persons pos- 
sessed of devils; and here, also, he raised Jairus's daughter 
from the dead. He went into a ship with his disciples, and 
when they roused him from sleep in the midst of a storm, he 
quieted the winds and lulled the troubled sea to rest with his 
voice. He passed over to the other side, a few miles away, 
and relieved two men of devils, which passed into some swine. 
After his return he called Matthew from the receipt of cus' 
toms, performed some cures, and created scandal by eating 
with publicans and sinners. Then he went healing and teach- 
ing through Galilee, and even journeyed to Tyre and Sidon. 
He chose the twelve disciples, and sent them abroad to preach 
the new gospel. He worked miracles in Bethsaida and Cho- 
razin — villages two or three miles from Capernaum. It was 
near one of them that the miraculous draft of fishes is sup- 
posed to have been taken, and it was in the desert places near 
the other that he fed the thousands by the miracles of the 
loaves and fishes. He cursed them both, and Capernaum also, 
for not repenting, after all the great works he had done in 
their midst, and prophesied against them. They are all in 
ruins, now — which is gratifying to the pilgrims, for, as usual, 
they fit the eternal words of gods to the evanescent things of 
this earth ; Christ, it is more probable, referred to the people, 
not their shabby villages of wigwams : he said it would be sad 
for them at "the day of judgment" — and what business have 
mud-hovels at the Day of Judgment % it would not affect the 
prophecy in the least — it would neither prove it or disprove it 
— if these towns were splendid cities now instead of the almost 



CHRIST'S FOUR BROTHERS. 50'i 

vanished ruins they are. Christ visited Magdala, which is near 
by Capernaum, and he also visited Cesarea Philippi. He 
went up to his old home at Nazareth, and saw his brothers 
Joses, and Judas, and James, and Simon — those persons who, 
being own brothers to Jesus Christ, one would expect to hear 
mentioned sometimes, yet who ever saw their names in a 
newspaper or heard them from a pulpit ? Who ever inquires, 
what manner of youths they were ; and whether they slept 
with Jesus, played with him and romped about him ; quarreled 
with him concerning toys and trifles ; struck him in anger, not 
suspecting what he was ? Who ever wonders what they 
thought when they saw him come back to Nazareth a celeb- 
rity, and looked long at his unfamiliar face to make sure, and 
then said, " It is Jesus V Who wonders what passed in their 
minds when they saw this brother, (who was only a brother ta 
them, however much he might be to others a mysterious stran- 
ger who was a god and had stood face to face with God above 
the clouds,) doing strange miracles with crowds of astonished 
people for witnesses ? Who wonders if the brothers of Jesus 
asked him to come home with them, and said his mother and 
his sisters were grieved at his long absence, and would be wild 
with delight to see his face again ? Who ever gives a thought 
to the sisters of Jesus at all % — yet he had sisters ; and memo- 
ries of them must have stolen into his mind often when he was 
ill-treated among strangers ; when he was homeless and said 
he had not where to lay his head ; when all deserted him, even 
Peter, and he stood alone among his enemies. 

Christ did few miracles in Nazareth, and staid but a little 
while. The people said, " Tliis the Son of God ! Why, his 
father is nothing but a carpenter. We know the family. We 
3ee them every day. Are not his brothers named so and so, 
and his sisters so and so, and is not his mother the person they 
call Mary ? This is absurd." He did not curse his home, but 
he shook its dust from his feet and went away. 

Capernaum lies close to the edge of the little sea, in a small 
plain some five miles long and a mile or two wide, which is 
mildly adorned with oleanders which look all the better con- 



602 THE CRADLE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

trasted with the bald hills and the howling deserts which sur- 
round them, but they are not as deliriously beautiful as the 
books paint them. If one be calm and resolute he can look 
upon their comeliness and live. 

One of the most astonishing things that have yet fallen un- 
der our observation is the exceedingly small portion of the 
earth from which sprang the now nourishing plant of Chris- 
tianity. The longest journey our Saviour ever performed was 
from here to Jerusalem — about one hundred to one hundred 
and twenty miles. The next longest was from here to Sidon 
— say about sixty or seventy miles. Instead of being wide 
apart — as American appreciation of distances would naturally 
suggest — the places made most particularly celebrated by the 
presence of Christ are nearly all right here in full view, and 
within cannon-shot of Capernaum. Leaving out two or three 
short journeys of the Saviour, he spent his life, preached his 
gospel, and performed his miracles within a compass no larger 
than an ordinary county in the United States. It is as much 
as I can do to comprehend this stupefying fact. How it wean 
a man out to have to read up a hundred pages of history every 
two or three miles — for verily the celebrated localities of Pal- 
estine occur that close together. How wearily, how bewilder- 
ingly they swarm about your path ! 

In due time we reached the ancient village of Magdala. 



CHAPTEE XLVIIL 



MAGDALA is not a beautiful place. It is thoroughly- 
Syrian, and that is to say that it is thoroughly ugly, 
and cramped, squalid, uncomfortable, and filthy — just the style 
of cities that have adorned the country since Adam's time, as 
all writers have labored hard to prove, and have succeeded. 
The streets of Magdala are any where from three to six feet 
wide, and reeking with uncleauliness. The houses are from 
five to seven feet high, and all built upon one arbitrary plan — 
the ungraceful form of a dry-goods box. The sides are daubed 
with a smooth white plaster, and tastefully frescoed aloft and 
alow with disks of camel-dung placed there to dry. This gives 
the edifice the romantic appearance of having been riddled 
with cannon-balls, and imparts to it a very warlike aspect. 
When the artist has arranged his materials with an eye to just 
proportion — the small and the large flakes in alternate rows, 
and separated by carefully-considered intervals — I know of 
nothing more cheerful to look upon than a spirited Syrian 
fresco. The flat, plastered roof is garnished by picturesque 
stacks of fresco materials, which, having become thoroughly 
dried and cured, are placed there where it will be convenient. 
It is used for fuel. There is no timber of any consequence in 
Palestine — none at all to waste upon fires — and neither are 
there any mines of coal. If my description has been intelli- 
gible, you will perceive, now, that a square, flat-roofed hovel, 
neatly frescoed, with its wall-tops gallantly bastioned and tur- 
re ted with dried camel-refuse, gives to a landscape a feature 
that is exceedingly festive and picturesque, especially if one is 



504 



GRAND RECEPTION OF THE PILGRIMS. 



careful to remember to stick in a cat wherever, about the 
premises, there is room for a cat to sit. There are no windows 
to a Syrian hut, and no chimneys. When I used to read that 
they let a bed-ridden man down through the roof of a house 
in Capernaum to get him into the presence of the Saviour, I 
generally had a three-story brick in my mind, and marveled 

that they 
did not 
break 
his neck 
with the 
strange 
experi- 
ment. I 
p e rceive 
now, 
however, 
that they 
might 
have ta- 
ken him 

by the heels and thrown him clear over the house without dis- 
commoding him very much. Palestine is not changed any 
since those days, in manners, customs, architecture, or people. 
As we rode into Magdala not a soul was visible. But the 
ring of the horses' hoofs roused the stupid population, and they 
all came trooping out — old men and old women, boys and 
girls, the blind, the crazy, and the crippled, all in ragged, 
soiled and scanty raiment, and all abject beggars by nature, 
instinct and education. How the vermin -tortured vagabonds 
did swarm ! How they showed their scars and sores, and pit- 
eously pointed to their maimed and crooked limbs, and begged 
with their pleading eyes for charity ! We had invoked a spirit 
we could not lay. They hung to the horses's tails, clung to 
their manes and the stirrups, closed in on every side in scorn 
of dangerous hoofs — and out of their infidel throats, with one 
accord, burst an agonizing and most infernal chorus : " How- 




SYRIAN HOUSE. 



OLD TIBERIAS. 505 

ajji, backsheesh ! howajji, buckslieesh ! howajji, backsheesh ! 
bucksheesh ! bucksheesh !" I never was in a storm like that 
before. 

As we paid the bucksheesh out to sore-eyed children and 
brown, buxom girls with repulsively tattooed lips and chins, 
we filed through the town and by many an exquisite fresco, 
till we came to a bramble-infested inclosure and a Roman- 
looking ruin which had been the veritable dwelling of St. Mary 
Magdalene, the friend and follower of Jesus. The guide be- 
lieved it, and so did I. I could not well do otherwise, with 
the house right there before my eyes as plain as day. The 
pilgrims took down portions of the front wall for specimens, 
as is their honored custom, and then we departed. 

We are camped in this place, now, just within the city walls 
of Tiberias. We went into the town before nightfall and 
looked at its people — we cared nothing about its houses. Its 
people are best examined at a distance. They are particularly 
uncomely Jews, Arabs, and negroes. Squalor and poverty are 
the pride of Tiberias. The young women wear their dower 
strung upon a strong wire that curves downward from the top 
of the head to the jaw — Turkish silver coins which they have 
raked together or inherited. Most of these maidens were not 
wealthy, but some few had been very kindly dealt with by for- 
tune. I saw heiresses there worth, in their own right — worth, 
well, I suppose I might venture to say, as much as nine dollars 
and a half. But such cases are rare. When you come across 
one of these, she naturally puts on airs. She will not ask for 
bucksheesh. She will not even permit of undue familiarity. 
She assumes a crushing dignity and goes on serenely prac- 
ticing with her fine-tooth comb and quoting poetry just the 
same as if you were not present at all. Some people can not 
stand prosperity. 

They say that the long-nosed, lanky, dyspeptic-looking body- 
snatchers, with the indescribable hats on, and a long curl 
dangling down in front of each ear, are the old, familiar, self- 
righteous Pharisees we read of in the Scriptures. Verily, they 
look it. Judging merely by their general style, and without 



506 



OLD TIBERIAS. 



other evidence, one might easily suspect that self-righteousness 
was their specialty. 

From various authorities I have culled information concern- 
ing Tiberias. It was built by Herod Antipas, the murderer 
of John the Baptist, and named after the Emperor Tiberius. 
It is believed that it stands upon the site of what must have 
been, ages ago, a city of considerable architectural pretensions, 
judging by the fine porphyry pillars that are scattered through 
Tiberias and down the lake shore southward. These were 
fluted, once, and yet, although the stone is about as hard as 
iron, the flutings are almost worn away. These pillars are 




TIBERIAS, AND SEA OF GALILEE. 



small, and doubtless the edifices they adorned were distin- 
guished more for elegance than grandeur. This modern town 
— Tiberias — is only mentioned in the New Testament ; never 
in the Old. 

The Sanhedrim met here last, and for three hundred years 



CONTRASTED SCENERY. 507 

Tiberias was the metropolis of the Jews in Palestine. It is 
ane of the four holy cities of the Israelites, and is to them what 
Mecca is to the Mohammedan and Jerusalem to the Christian. 
It has been the abiding place of many learned and famous 
Jewish rabbins. They lie buried here, and near them lie also 
twenty-five thousand of their faith who traveled far to be near 
them while they lived and lie with them when they died. The 
great Rabbi Ben Israel spent three years here in the early part 
of the third century. He is dead, now. 

The celebrated Sea of Galilee is not so large a sea as Lake 
Tahoe* by a good deal — it is just about two-thirds as large. 
And when we come to speak of beauty, this sea is no more to 
be compared to Tahoe than a meridian of longitude is to a 
rainbow. The dim waters of this pool can not suggest the lim- 
pid brilliancy of Tahoe ; these low, shaven, yellow hillocks of 
rocks and sand, so devoid of perspective, can not suggest the 
grand peaks that compass Tahoe like a wall, and whose ribbed 
and chasmed fronts are clad with stately pines that seem to 
grow small and smaller as they climb, till one might fancy 
them reduced to weeds and shrubs far upward, where they join 
the everlasting snows. Silence and solitude brood over Tahoe ; 
and silence and solitude brood also over this lake of Genessa- 
ret. But the solitude of the one is as cheerful and fascinating 
as the solitude of the other is dismal and repellant. 

In the early morning one watches the silent battle of dawn 
and darkness upon the waters of Tahoe with a placid interest; 
but when the shadows sulk away and one by one the hidden 
beauties of the shore unfold themselves in the full splendor of 
noon ; when the still surface is belted like a rainbow with broad 
bars of blue and green and white, half the distance from cir- 
cumference to centre ; when, in the lazy summer afternoon, he 
lies in a boat, far cut to where the dead blue of the deep water 
begins, and smokes the pipe of peace and idly winks at the 

* I measure all lakes by Tahoe, partly because I am far more familiar with it 
than with any other, and partly because I have such a high admiration for it and 
such a world of pleasant recollections of it, that it is very nearly impossible for me 
to speak of lakes and not mention it. 



508 CONTRASTED SCENERY. 

distant crags and patches of snow from under his cap-brim ; 
when the boat drifts shoreward to the white water, and he lolls 
over the gunwale and gazes by the hour down through the 
crystal depths and notes the colors of the pebbles and reviews 
the finny armies gliding in procession a hundred feet below ;. 
when at night he sees moon and stars, mountain ridges feath- 
ered with pines, jutting white capes, bold promontories, grand 
sweeps of rugged scenery topped with bald, glimmering peaks, 
all magnificently pictured in the polished mirror of the lake, 
in richest, softest detail, the tranquil interest that was born 
with the morning deepens and deepens, by sure degrees, till it 
culminates at last in resistless fascination ! 

It is solitude, for birds and squirrels on the shore and fishes 
in the water are all the creatures that are near to make it oth- 
erwise, but it is not the sort of solitude to make one dreary. 
Come to Galilee for that. If these unpeopled deserts, these 
rusty mounds of barrenness, that never, never, never do shake 
the glare from their harsh outlines, and fade and faint into 
vague perspective ; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum ; this 
stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under its six funereal 
plumes of palms ; yonder desolate declivity where the swine 
of the miracle ran down into the sea, and doubtless thought it 
was better to swallow a devil or two and get drowned into the 
bargain than have to live longer in such a place ; this cloud- 
less, blistering sky ; this solemn, sailless, tintless lake, reposing 
within its rim of yellow hills and low, steep banks, and look- 
ing just as expressionless and unpoetical (when we leave its 
sublime history out of the question,) as any metropolitan res- 
ervoir in Christendom — if these things are not food for rock 
me to sleep, mother, none exist, I think. 

But I should not offer the evidence for the prosecution and 
leave the defense unheard. Wm. C. Grimes deposes as fol- 
lows : — 

"We had taken ship to go over to the other side. The sea was not more thau 
six miles wide. Of the beauty of the scene, however, I can not say enough, nor 
can I imagine where those travelers carried their eyes who have described the 
scenery of the lake as tame or uninteresting. The first great characteristic of it is 



GKIMES'S OPINION. 509 

the deep basin in which it lies. This is from three to four hundred feet deep on all 
sides except at the lower end, and the sharp slope of the banks, which are all of 
the richest green, is broken and diversified by the wadys and water-courses which 
work their way down through the sides of the basin, forming dark chasms or light 
sunny valleys. Near Tiberias these banks are rocky, and ancient sepulchres open 
in them, with their doors toward the water. They selected grand spots, as did the 
Egyptians of old, for burial places, as if they designed that when the voice of God 
should reach the sleepers, they should walk forth and open their eyes on scenes of 
glorious beauty. On the east, the wild and desolate mountains contrast finely with 
the deep blue lake ; and toward the north, sublime and majestic, Hermon looks 
down on the sea, lifting his white crown to heaven with the pride of a hill that has 
seen the departing footsteps of a hundred generations. On the north-east shore of 
the sea was a single tree, and this is the only tree of any size visible from the wa- 
ter of the lake, except a few lonely palms in the city of Tiberias, and by its soli- 
tary position attracts more attention than would a forest. The whole appearance 
of the scene is precisely what we would expect and desire the scenery of Genes- 
saret to be, grand beauty, but quiet calm. The very mountains are calm." 

It is an ingeniously written description, and well calculated 
to deceive. But if the paint and the ribbons and the flowers 
be stripped from it, a skeleton will be found beneath. 

So stripped, there remains a lake six miles wide and neutral 
in color ; with steep green banks, unrelieved by shrubbery ; at 
one end bare, unsightly rocks, with (almost invisible) holes in 
them of no consequence to the picture ; eastward, " wild and 
desolate mountains ;" (low, desolate hills, he should have 
said ;) in the north, a mountain called Hermon, with snow on 
it ; peculiarity of the picture, " calmness ;" its prominent fea- 
ture, one tree. 

No ingenuity could make such a picture beautiful — to one's 
actual vision. 

I claim the right to correct misstatements, and have so cor- 
rected the color of the water in the above recapitulation. The 
waters of Genessaret are of an exceedingly mild blue, even 
from a high elevation and a distance of five miles. Close at 
hand (the witness was sailing on the lake,) it is hardly proper 
to call them blue at all, much less " deep " blue. I wish to 
state, also, not as a correction, but as matter of opinion, that 
Mount Hermon is not a striking or picturesque mountain by 
any means, being too near the height of its immediate neigh- 



510 C. W. E.'S OPINION. 

bors to be so. That is all. I do not object to the witness 
dragging a mountain forty-five miles to help the scenery under 
consideration, because it is entirely proper to do it, and besides, 
the picture needs it. 

" C. W. E. ? " (of "Life in the Holy Land,") deposes as fol- 
lows : — 

" A beautiful sea lies unbosomed among the Galilean hills, in the midst of that 
land once possessed by Zebulon and Naphtali, Asher and Dan. The azure of th# 
sky penetrates the depths of the lake, and the waters are sweet and cool. On the 
west, stretch broad fertile plains ; on the north the rocky shores rise step by step 
until in the far distance tower the snowy heights of Hermon; on the east througk 
a misty veil are seen the high plains of Perea, which stretch away in rugged 
mountains leading the mind by varied paths toward Jerusalem the Holy. Flowers 
bloom in this terrestrial paradise, once beautiful and verdant with waving trees; 
singing birds enchant the ear ; the turtle-dove soothes with its soft note ; the crest- 
ed lark sends up its song toward heaven, and the grave and stately stork inspire* 
the mind with thought, and leads it on to meditation and repose. Life here wag 
once idyllic, charming; here were once no rich, no poor, no high, no low. It waa 
a world of ease, simplicity, and beauty; now it is a scene of desolation anil 
misery." 

This is not an ingenious picture. It is the worst I ever saw. 
It describes in elaborate detail what it terms a " terrestrial 
paradise," and closes w^h the startling information that this 
paradise is " a scene ot desolation and misery" 

I have given two fair, average specimens of the character of 
the testimony offered by the majority of the writers who visit 
this region. One says, " Of the beauty of the scene I can not 
say enough," and then proceeds to cover up with a woof of 
glittering sentences a thing which, when stripped for inspec- 
tion, proves to be only an unobtrusive basin of water, some 
mountainous desolation, and one tree. The other, after a con- 
scientious effort to build a terrestrial paradise out of the same 
materials, with the addition of a " grave and stately stork," 
spoils it all by blundering upon the ghastly truth at the last. 

Nearly every book concerning Galilee and its lake describe* 
the scenery as beautiful. No — not always so straightforward 
as that. Sometimes the impression intentionally conveyed is 
that it is beautiful, at the same time that the author is careful 



DENOMINATIONAL SIGHT-SEEING. 5V1 

not to say that it is, in plain Saxon. But a careful analysis of 
these descriptions will show that the materials of which they are 
formed are not individually beautiful and can not be wrought 
into combinations that are beautiful. The veneration and the 
affection which some of these men felt for the scenes they 
were speaking of, heated their fancies and biased their judg- 
ment ; but the pleasant falsities they wrote were full of honest 
sincerity, at any rate. Others wrote as they did, because they 
feared it would be unpopular to write otherwise. Others were 
hypocrites and deliberately meant to deceive. Any of them 
would say in a moment, if asked, that it was always right and 
always best to tell the truth. They would say that, at any rate, 
if they did not perceive the drift of the question. 

But why should not "the truth be spoken of this region ? Is 
the truth harmful ? Has it ever needed to hide its face ? God 
made the Sea of Galilee and its surroundings as they are. Is 
it the province of Mr. Grimes to improve upon the work ? 

I am sure, from the tenor of books I have read, that many 
who have visited this land in years gone by, were Presbyte- 
rians, and came seeking evidences in support of their particular 
creed ; they found a Presbyterian Palestine, ard they had al- 
ready made up their minds to find no other, though possibly 
they did not know it, being blinded by theii zeal. Others 
were Baptists, seeking Baptist evidences and a Baptist Pales- 
tine. Others were Catholics, Methodists, Episc3palians, seek- 
ing evidences indorsing their several creeds, and a Catholic, a 
Methodist, an Episcopalian Palestine. Honest as these men's 
intentions may have been, they were full of partialities and 
prejudices, they entered the country with their verdicts already 
prepared, and they could no more write dispassionately and 
impartially about it than they could about their own wives 
and children. Our pilgrims have brought their verdicts with 
them. They have shown it in their conversation ever since 
we left Beirout. I can almost tell, in set phrase, what they 
will say when they see Tabor, Nazareth, Jericho and Jeru- 
salem — because I have the boohs they will tt smouch " their ideas 
from. These authors write pictures and frame rhapsodies, and 



612 THE SACRED SEA BY NIGHT. 

lesser men follow and see with the author's eyes instead of 
their own, and speak with his tongue. What the pilgrims 
said at Cesarea Philippi surprised me with its wisdom. I 
found it afterwards in Robinson. What they said when 
Genessaret burst upon their vision, charmed me with its grace. 
I find it in Mr. Thompson's "Land and the Book." They 
have spoken often, in happily worded language which never 
varied, of how they mean to lay their weary heads upon a 
stone at Bethel, as Jacob did, and close their dim eyes, and 
dream, perchance, of angels descending out of heaven on a 
ladder. It was very pretty. But I have recognized the weary 
head and the dim eyes, finally. They borrowed the idea — and 
the words — and the construction — and the punctuation — from 
Grimes. The pilgrims will tell of Palestine, when they get 
home, not as it appeared to them, but as it appeared to Thomp- 
son and Robinson and Grimes — with the tints varied to suit 
each pilgrim's creed. 

Pilgrim,], sinners and Arabs are all abed, now, and the camp 
is still. Labor in loneliness is irksome. Since I made my last 
few notes, I have been sitting outside the tent for half an hour. 
Night is the time to see Galilee. Genessaret under these lus- 
trous stars has nothing repulsive about it. Genessaret with 
the glittering reflections of the constellations flecking its sur- 
face, almost makes me regret that I ever saw the rude glare of 
the day upon it. Its history and its associations are its chief- 
est charm, in any eyes, and the spells they weave are feeble in 
the searching light of the sun. Then, we scarcely feel the fet- 
ters. Our thoughts wander constantly to the practical con- 
cerns of life, and refuse to dwell upon things that seem vague 
and unreal. But when the day is done, even the most unim- 
pressible must yield to the dreamy influences of this tranquil 
starlight. The old traditions of the place steal upon his mem- 
ory and haunt his reveries, and then his fancy clothes all 
sights and sounds with the supernatural. In the lapping of 
the waves upon the beach, he hears the dip of ghostly oars ; 
in the secret noises of the night he hears spirit voices ; in the 
soft sweep of the breeze, the rush of invisible wings. Phan- 



THE SACRED SEA BY NIGHT. 515 

torn ships are on the sea, the dead of twenty centuries come 
forth from the tombs, and in the dirges of the night wind the 
songs of old forgotten ages find utterance again. 

In the starlight, Galilee has no boundaries but the broad 
compass of the heavens, and is a theatre meet for great events; 
meet for the birth of a religion able to save a world ; and 
meet for the stately Figure appointed to stand upon its stage 
and proclaim its high decrees. But in the sunlight, one says : 
Is it for the deeds which were done and the words which were 
spoken in this little acre of rocks and sand eighteen centuries 
gone, that the bells are ringing to-day in the remote islands of 
the sea and far and wide over continents that clasp the cir- 
cumference of the huge globe ? 

One can comprehend it only when night has hidden all in- 
congruities and created a theatre proper for so grand a drama. 

33 



OHAPTEE XLIX. 

"TTT"E took another swim in the Sea of Galilee at twilight 
* ▼ yesterday, and another at sunrise this morning. We 
have not sailed, but three swims are equal to a sail, are they 
not ? There were plenty of fish visible in the water, but we 
have no outside aids in this pilgrimage but " Tent Life in the 
Holy Land," " The Land and the Book," and other literature 
of like description — no fishing-tackle. There were no fish to 
be had in the village of Tiberias. True, we saw two or three 
vagabonds mending their nets, but never trying to catch any 
thing with them. 

We did not go to the ancient warm baths two miles below 
Tiberias. I had no desire in the world to go there. This 
seemed a little strange, and prompted me to try to discover 
what the cause of this unreasonable indifference was. It turned 
oat to be simply because Pliny mentions them. I have con- 
ceived a sort of unwarrantable unfriendliness toward Pliny 
and St. Paul, because it seems as if I can never ferret out a 
place that I can have to myself. It always and eternally 
transpires that St. Paul has been to that place, and Pliny has 
" mentioned " it. 

In the early morning we mounted and started. And then a 
weird apparition marched forth at the head of the procession — 
a pirate, I thought, if ever a pirate dwelt upon land. It was 
a tall Arab, as swarthy as an Indian ; young — say thirty years 
of age. On his head he had closely bound a gorgeous yellow 
and red striped silk scarf, whose ends, lavishly fringed with 
tassels, hung down between his shoulders and dallied with the 



THE APPARITION. 515 

wind. From his neck to Lis knees, in ample folds, a robe 
swept down that was a very star-spangled banner of curved 
and sinuous bars of black and white. Out of his back, some- 
where, apparently, the long stem of a chibouk projected, and 
reached far above his right shoulder. Athwart his back, diag- 
onally, and extending high above his left shoulder, was an 
Arab gun of Saladin's time, that was splendid with silver pla- 
ting from stock clear up to the end of its measureless stretch 
of barrel. About his waist was bound many and many a yard 
of elaborately figured but sadly tarnished stuff that came from 
sumptuous Persia, and among the baggy folds in front the sun- 
beams glinted from a formidable battery of old brass-mounted 
horse-pistols and the gilded hilts of blood-thirsty knives. 
There were holsters for more pistols appended to the wonder- 
ful stack of long-haired goat-skins and Persian carpets, which 
the man had been taught to regard in the light of a saddle ; 
and down among the pendulous rank of vast tassels that 
swung from that saddle, and clanging against the iron shovel 
of a stirrup that propped the warrior's knees up toward his 
chin, was a crooked, silver-clad scimetar of such awful dimen- 
sions and such implacable expression that no man might hope 
to look upon it and not shudder. The fringed and bedizened 
prince whose privilege it is to ride the pony and lead the ele- 
phant into a country village is poor and naked compared to 
this chaos of paraphernalia, and the happy vanity of the one 
is the very poverty of satisfaction compared to the majestic 
serenity, the overwhelming complacency of the other. 

" Who is this ? What is this?" That was the trembling in- 
quiry all down the line. 

" Our guard ! From Galilee to the birthplace of the Saviour, 
the country is infested with fierce Bedouins, whose sole happi- 
ness it is, in this life, to cut and stab and mangle and murder 
unoffending Christians. Allah be with us !" 

" Then hire a regiment ! Would you send us out among 
these desperate hordes, with no salvation in our utmost need 
but this old turret ?" 

The dragoman laughed — not at the facetiousness of the sinu 



516 



THE APPARITION. 



ile, for verily, that guide or that courier or that dragoman 
never yet lived upon earth who had in him the faintest appre- 
ciation of a joke, even though that joke were so broad and so 
ponderous that if it fell on him it would flatten him out like a 
postage stamp — the dragoman laughed, and then, emboldened 




^^C^^A^.l^ 



['HE GUARD. 



by some thought that was in his brain, no doubt, proceeded to 
extremities and winked. 

In straits like these, when a man laughs, it is encouraging ; 
when he winks, it is positively reassuring. He finally inti- 
mated that one guard would be sufficient to protect us, but that 
that one was an absolute necessity. It was because of the 



INSPECTING THE APPARITION. 517 

moral weight his awful panoply would have with the Bedouins. 
Then I said we didn't want any guard at all. If one fantastic 
vagabond could protect eight armed Christians and a pack of 
Arab servants from all harm, surely that detachment could 
protect themselves. He shook his head doubtfully. Then I 
said, just think of how it looks — think cf now it would read, 
to self-reliant Americans, that we went sneaking through this 
deserted wilderness under the protection of this masquerading 
Arab, who would break his neck getting out of the country 
if a man that was a man ever started after him. It was a 
mean, low, degrading position. Why were we ever told to 
bring navy revolvers with us if we had to be protected at last 
by this infamous star-spangled scum of the desert ? These ap- 
peals were vain — the dragoman only smiled and shook his 
head. 

I rode to the front and struck up an acquaintance with King 
Solomon-in-all-his-glory, and got him to show me his lingering 
eternity of a gun. It had a rusty flint lock ; it was ringed 
and barred and plated with silver from end to end, but it was 
as desperately out of the perpendicular as are the billiard cues 
of '49 that one finds yet in service in the ancient mining 
camps of California. The muzzle was eaten by the rust of 
centuries into a ragged filagree-work, like the end of a burnt- 
out stove-pipe. I shut one eye and peered within — it was 
flaked with iron rust like an old steamboat boiler. I borrowed 
the ponderous pistols and snapped them. They were rusty in- 
side, too — had not been loaded for a generation. I went back, 
full of encouragement, and reported to the guide, and asked 
him to discharge this dismantled fortress. It came out, then. 
This fellow was a retainer of the Sheik of Tiberias. He was 
a source of Government revenue. He was to the Empire of 
Tiberias what the customs are to America. The Sheik im- 
posed guards upon travelers and charged them for it. It is a 
lucrative source of emolument, and sometimes brings into the 
national treasury as much as thirty-five or forty dollars a year. 

I knew the warrior's secret now ; I knew the hollow vanity 
of his rusty trumpery, and despised his asinine complacency. 



518 A DISTINGUISHED PANORAMA. 

I told on him, and with reckless daring the cavalcade rode 
straight ahead into the perilous solitudes of the desert, and 
scorned his frantic warnings of the mutilation and death that 
hovered about them on every side. 

Arrived at an elevation of twelve hundred feet above the 
lake, (I ought to mention that the lake lies six hundred feet 
below the level of the Mediterranean — no traveler ever neglects 
to nourish that fragment of news in his letters,) as bald and 
unthrilling a panorama as any land can afford, perhaps, was 
spread out before us. Yet it was- so crowded with historical 
interest, that if all the pages that have been written about it 
were spread upon its surface, they would nag it from horizon 
to horizon like a pavement. Among the localities comprised 
in this view, were Mount Hermon ; the hills that border Cesa- 
rea Philippi, Dan, the Sources of the Jordan and the Waters 
ofMerom; Tiberias; the Sea of Galilee ; Joseph's Pit; Caper- 
naum ; Bethsaida ; the supposed scenes of the Sermon on the 
Mount, the feeding of the multitudes and the miraculous 
draught of fishes ; the declivity down which the swine ran to 
the sea ; the entrance and the exit of the Jordan ; Safed, " the 
city set upon a hill," one of the four holy cities of the Jews, 
and the place where they believe the real Messiah will appear 
when he comes to redeem the world ; part of the battle-field 
ot Hattin, where the knightly Crusaders fought their last fight T 
and in a blaze of glory passed from the stage and ended their 
splendid career forever; Mount Tabor, the traditional scene of 
the Lord's Transfiguration. And down toward the southeast 
lay a landscape that suggested to my mind a quotation (imper- 
fectly remembered, no doubt :) 

"The Ephraimites, not being called upon to share in the rich spoils of the Am- 
monitish war, assembled a mighty host to right against Jeptha, Judge of Israel ; 
who, being apprised of their approach, gathered together the men of Israel and 
gave them battle and put them to flight. To make his victory the more secure, he 
stationed guards at the different fords and passages of the Jordan, with instructions 
to let none pass who could not say Shibboleth. The Ephraimites, being of a dif- 
ferent tribe, could not frame to pronounce the word aright, but called it Sibboleth, 
which proved them enemies and cost them their lives ; wherefore, forty and two 
thousand fell at the different fords and passages of the Jordan that day." 



LAST BATTLE OF THE CRUSADES. 519 

We jogged along peacefully over the great caravan route 
from Damascus to Jerusalem and Egypt, past Lubia and other 
Syrian hamlets, perched, in the unvarying style, upon the sum- 
mit of steep mounds and hills, and fenced round about with 
giant cactuses, (the sign of worthless land,) with prickly pears 
upon them like hams, and came at last to the battle-field of 
Hattin. 

It is a grand, irregular plateau, and looks as if it might have 
been created for a battle-field. Here the peerless Saladin met 
the Christian host some seven hundred years ago, and broke 
their power in Palestine for all time to come. There had long 
been a truce between the opposing forces, but according to the 
Guide-Book, Raynauld of Chatillon, Lord of Kerak, broke it 
by plundering a Damascus caravan, and refusing to give up 
either the merchants or their goods when Saladin demanded 
them. This conduct of an insolent petty chieftain stung the 
Sultan to the quick, and he swore that he would slaughter 
Raynauld with his own hand, no matter how, or when, or 
where he found him. Both armies prepared for war. Under 
the weak King of Jerusalem was the very flower of the Chris- 
tian chivalry. He foolishly compelled them to undergo a long, 
exhausting march, in the scorching sun, and then, without 
water or other refreshment, ordered them to encamp in this 
open plain. The splendidly mounted masses of Moslem soldiers 
swept round the north end of G-enessaret, burning and destroy- 
ing as they came, and pitched their camp in front of the oppo- 
sing lines. At dawn the terrific fight began. Surrounded on 
all sides by the Sultan's swarming battalions, the Christian 
Knights fought on without a hope for their lives. They fought 
with desperate valor, but to no purpose ; the odds of heat and 
numbers, and consuming thirst, were too great against them. 
Towards the middle of the day the bravest of their band cut 
their way through the Moslem ranks and gained the summit 
of a little hill, and there, hour after hour, they closed around 
the banner of the Cross, and beat back the charging squadrons 
of the enemy. 

But the doom of the Christian power was sealed. Sunset 



520 MOUNT TABOR. 

found Saladin Lord of Palestine, the Christian chivalry strewn 
in heaps upon the field, and the King of Jerusalem, the Grand 
Master of the Templars, and Raynauld of Chatillon, captives 
in the Sultan's tent. Saladin treated two of the prisoners with 
princely courtesy, and ordered refreshments to be set before 
them. When the King handed an iced Sherbet to Chatillon, 
the Sultan said, " It is thou that givest it to him, not I." He 
remembered his oath, and slaughtered the hapless Knight of 
Chatillon with his own hand. 

It was hard to realize that this silent plain had once re- 
sounded with martial music and trembled to the tramp of 
armed men. It was hard to people this solitude with rushing 
columns of cavalry, and stir its torpid pulses with the shouts 
of victors, the shrieks of the wounded, and the flash of banner 
and steel above the surging billows of war. A desolation is 
here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life 
and action. 

We reached Tabor safely, and considerably in advance 
of that old iron-clad swindle of a guard. We never saw a 
human being on the whole route, much less lawless hordes of 
Bedouins. Tabor stands solitary and alone, a giant sentinel 
above the Plain of Esdraelon. It rises some fourteen hundred 
feet above the surrounding level, a green, wooden cone, sym- 
metrical and full of grace — a prominent landmark, and one 
that is exceedingly pleasant to eyes surfeited with the repul- 
sive monotony of desert Syria. We climbed the steep path to 
its summit, through breezy glades of thorn and oak. The view 
presented from its highest peak was almost beautiful. Below, 
was the broad, level plain of Esdraelon, checkered with fields 
like a chess-board, and full as smooth and level, seemingly ; 
dotted about its borders with white, compact villages, and 
faintly penciled, far and near, with the curving lines of roads 
and trails. When it is robed in the fresh verdure of spring, it 
must form a charming picture, even by itself. Skirting its 
southern border rises " Little Hermon," over whose summit a 
glimpse of Gilboa is caught. Nain, famous for the raising of 
the widow's son, and Endor, as famous for the performances 



VIEW F 11 M TABOR 



521 



of her witch, are in view. To the eastward lies the Valley of 
the Jordan and beyond it the mountains of Gilead. Westward 
is Mount Carmel. Hermon in the north — the table-lands of 
Bashan — Safed, the holy city, gleaming white upon a tall spur 
of the mountains of Lebanon — a steel-blue corner of the Sea 
of Galilee — saddle-peaked Hattin, traditional " Mount of Beat- 
itudes " and 
mute witness 
of the last 
brave fight 
of the Crusa- 
ding host for 
Holy Cross — 
these fill up 
the picture. 

To glance 
at the salient 
features of 
this landscape 
through the 
p i c t uresque 

framework of a ragged and ruined stone window-arch of the 
time of Christ, thus hiding from sight all that is unattractive, 
is to secure to yourself a pleasure worth climbing the moun- 
tain to enjoy. One must stand on his head to get the best 
effect in a fine sunset, and set a landscape in a bold, strong 
framework that is very close at hand, to bring out all its beau- 
ty. One learns this latter truth never more to forget it, in that 
mimic land of enchantment, the wonderful garden of my lord 
the Count Pallavicini, near Genoa. You go wandering for 
hours among hills and wooded glens, artfully contrived to 
leave the impression that Nature shaped them and not man ; 
following winding paths and coming suddenly upon leaping 
cascades and rustic bridges ; finding sylvan lakes where you 
expected them not ; loitering through battered mediieval cas- 
tles in miniature that seem hoary with age and yet were built 
a dozen years ago; meditating over ancient crumbling tombs, 




MOUNT TABOR. 



522 A WONDERFUL GARDEN. 

whose marble columns were marred and broken purposely by 
the modern artist that made them ; stumbling unawares upon 
toy palaces, wrought of rare and costly materials, and again 
upon a peasant's hut, whose dilapidated furniture would never 
suggest that it was made so to order ; sweeping round and 
round in the midst of a forest on an enchanted wooden horse 
that is moved by some invisible agency ; traversing Roman 
roads and passing under majestic triumphal arches; resting in 
quaint bowers where unseen spirits discharge jets of water on 
you fl'om every possible direction, and where even the flowers 
you touch assail you with a shower ; boating on a subterranean 
lake among caverns and arches royally draped with clustering 
stalactites, and passing out into open day upon another lake, 
which is bordered with sloping banks of grass and gay with 
patrician barges that swim at anchor in the shadow of a min- 
iature marble temple that rises out of the clear water and 
glasses its white statues, its rich capitals and fluted columns 
in the tranquil depths. So, from marvel to marvel you have 
drifted on, thinking all the time that the one last seen must be 
the chiefest. And, verily, the chiefest wonder is reserved until 
the last, but you do not see it until you step ashore, and pass- 
ing through a wilderness of rare flowers, collected from every 
corner of the earth, you stand at the door of one more mimic 
temple. Right in this place the artist taxed his genius to the 
utmost, and fairly opened the gates of fairy land. You look 
through an unpretending pane of glass, stained yellow ; the 
first thing you see is a mass of quivering foliage, ten short steps 
before you, in the midst of which is a ragged opening like a 
gateway — a thing that is common enough in nature, and not 
apt to excite suspicions of a deep human design — and above 
the bottom of the gateway, project, in the most careless way, 
a few broad tropic leaves and brilliant flowers. All of a sud- 
den, through this bright, bold gateway, }^ou catch a glimpse 
of the faintest, softest, richest picture that ever graced the 
dream of a dying Saint, since John saw the New Jerusalem 
glimmering above the clouds of Heaven. A broad sweep of 
sea, flecked with careening sails ; a sharp, jutting cape, and a 



A NOTED BATTLE-FIELD. 523 

lofty lighthouse on it ; a sloping lawn behind it ; beyond, a 
portion of the old " city of palaces," with its parks and hills 
and stately mansions ; beyond these, a prodigious mountain, 
with its strong outlines sharply cut against ocean and sky ; and 
over all, vagrant shreds and flakes of cloud, floating in a sea 
of gold. The ocean is gold, the city is gold, the meadow, the 
mountain, the sky — every thing is golden — rich, and mellow, 
and dreamy as a vision of Paradise. No artist could put upon 
canvas its entrancing beauty, and yet, without the yellow 
glass, and the carefully contrived accident of a framework that 
cast it into enchanted distance and shut out from it all unat- 
tractive features, it was not a picture to fall into ecstacies over. 
Such is life, and the trail of the serpent is over us all. 

There is nothing for it now but to come back to old Tabor, 
though the subject is tiresome enough, and I can not stick to 
it for wandering off to scenes that are pleasanter to remember. 
I think I will skip, any how. There is nothing about Tabor 
(except we concede that it was the scene of the Transfigura- 
tion,) but some gray old ruins, stacked up there in all ages of 
the world from the days of stout Gideon and parties that 
flourished thirty centuries ago to the fresh yesterday of Cru- 
sading times. It has its Greek Convent, and the coffee there 
is good, but never a splinter of the true cross or bone of a hal- 
lowed saint to arrest the idle thoughts of worldlings and turn 
them into graver channels. A Catholic church is nothing to 
me that has no relics. 

The plain of Esdraelon — " the battle-field of the nations " — 
only sets one to dreaming of Joshua, and Benhadad, and Saul, 
and Gideon ; Tamerlane, Tancred, Coeur de Lion, and Saladin; 
the warrior Kings of Persia, Egypt's heroes, and Napoleon — 
for they all fought here. If the magic of the moonlight could 
summon from the graves of forgotten centuries and many lands 
the countless myriads that have battled on this wide, far- 
reaching floor, and array them in the thousand strange cos- 
tumes of their hundred nationalities, and send the vast host 
sweeping down the plain, splendid with plumes and banners 
and glittering lances, I could stay here an age to see the phan- 



524 HOME OF DEBORAH, THE PROPHETESS. 

torn pageant. But the magic of the moonlight is a vanity and 
a fraud ; and whoso putteth his trust in it shall suffer sorrow 
and disappointment. 

Down at the foot of Tabor, and just at the edge of the sto- 
ried Plain of Esdraelon, is the insignificant village of Deburieh, 
where Deborah, prophetess of Israel, lived. It is just like 
Magdala. 




CHAPTEE L. 

"TT7"E descended from Mount Tabor, crossed a deep ravine, 
V V and followed a hilly, rocky road to Nazareth — distant 
two hours. All distances in the East are measured by hours, 
not miles. A good horse will walk three miles an hour over 
nearly any kind of a road ; therefore, an hour, here, always 
stands for three miles. This method of computation is both- 
ersome and annoying ; and until one gets thoroughly accus- 
tomed to it, it carries no intelligence to his mind until he has 
stopped and translated the pagan hours into Christian miles, 
just as people do with the spoken words of a foreign language 
they are acquainted with, but not familiarly enough to catch 
the meaning in a moment. Distances traveled by human feet 
are also estimated by hours and minutes, though I do not 
know what the base of the calculation is. In Constantinople 
you ask, " How far is it to the Consulate ?" and they answer, 
" About ten minutes." " How far is it to the Lloyds' Agency ?" 
" Quarter of an hour." " How far is it to the lower bridge ?" 
" Four minutes." I can not be positive about it, but I think 
that there, when a man orders a pair of pantaloons, he says he 
wants them a quarter of a minute in the legs and nine seconds 
around the waist. 

Two hours from Tabor to Nazareth — and as it was an un- 
commonly narrow, crooked trail, we necessarily met all the 
camel trains and jackass caravans between Jericho and Jack- 
sonville in that particular place and nowhere else. The don- 
keys do not matter so much, because they are so small that 
you can jump your horse over them if he is an animal of spirit, 



526 MORE ENLIGHTENMENT. 

but a camel is not jumpable. A camel is as tall as any ordi- 
nary dwelling-house in Syria — which is to say a camel is from 
one to two, and sometimes nearly three feet taller than a good- 
sized man. In this part of the country his load is oftenest in 
the shape of colossal sacks — one on each side. He and his 
cargo take up as much room as a carriage. Think of meeting 
this style of obstruction in a narrow trail. The camel would 
not turn out for a king. He stalks serenely along, bringing 
his cushioned stilts forward with the long, regular swing of a 
pendulum, and whatever is in the way must get out of the way 
peaceably, or be wiped out forcibly by the bulky sacks. It 
was a tiresome ride to us, and perfectly exhausting to the 
horses. We were compelled to jump over upwards of eighteen 
hundred donkeys, and only one person in the party was un- 
seated less than sixty times by the camels. This seems like a 
powerful statement, but the poet has said, " Things are not 
what they seem." I can not think of any thing, now, more 
certain to make one shudder, than to have a soft-footed camel 
sneak up behind him and touch him on the ear with its cold, 
flabby under-lip. A camel did this for one of the boys, who 
was drooping over his saddle in a brown study. He glanced 
up and saw the majestic apparition hovering above him, and 
made frantic efforts to get out of the way, but the camel 
reached out and bit him on the shoulder before he accom- 
plished it. This was the only pleasant incident of the jour- 
ney. 

At Nazareth we camped in an olive grove near the Virgin 
Mary's fountain, and that wonderful Arab "guard" came to 
collect some bucksheesh for his " services " in following us from 
Tiberias and warding off invisible dangers with the terrors of 
his armament. The dragoman had paid his master, but that 
counted as nothing — if you hire a man to sneeze for you, here, 
and another man chooses to help him, you have got to pay 
both. They do nothing whatever without pay. How it must 
have surprised these people to hear the way of salvation offered 
to them " without money and without price." If the manners, 
the people or the customs of this country have changed since 



GROTTO OF THE ANNUNCIATION. 527 

the Saviour's time, the figures and metaphors of the Bible are 
not the evidences to prove it by. 

We entered the great Latin Convent which is built over the 
traditional dwelling-place of the Holy Family. We went 
down a flight of fifteen steps below the ground level, and stood 
in a small chapel tricked out with tapestry hangings, silver 
lamps, and oil paintings. A spot marked by a cross, in the 
marble floor, under the altar, was exhibited as the place made 
forever holy by the feet of the Virgin when she stood up to 
receive the message of the angel. So simple, so unpretending 
a locality, to be the scene of so mighty an event ! The very 
scene of the Annunciation — an event which has been com- 
memorated by splendid shrines and august temples all over the 
civilized world, and one which the princes of art have made it 
their loftiest ambition to picture worthily on their canvas ; a 
spot whose history is familiar to the very children of every 
house, and city, and obscure hamlet of the furthest lands of 
Christendom ; a spot which myriads of men would toil across 
the breadth of a world to see, would consider it a priceless 
privilege to look upon. It was easy to think these thoughts. 
But it was not easy to bring myself up to the magnitude of the 
situation. I could sit off several thousand miles and imagine 
the angel appearing, with shadowy wings and lustrous counte- 
nance, and note the glory that streamed downward upon the 
Yirgin's head while the message from the Throne of God fell 
upon her ears — any one can do that, beyond the ocean, but few 
can do it here. I saw the little recess from which the angel 
stepped, but could not fill its void. The angels that I know 
are creatures of unstable fancy — they will not fit in niches of 
substantial stone. Imagination labors best in distant fields. I 
doubt if any man can stand in the Grotto of the Annunciation 
and people with the phantom images of his mind its too tan- 
gible walls of stone. 

They showed us a broken granite pillar, depending from the 
roof, which they said was hacked in two by the Moslem con- 
querors of Nazareth, in the vain hope of pulling down the 
sanctuary. But the pillar remained miraculously suspended 



528 NOTED GROTTOES IN GENERAL. 

in the air, and, unsupported itself, supported then and still 
supports the roof. By dividing this statement up among eight, 
it was found not difficult to believe it. 

These gifted Latin monks never do any thing by halves. If 
they were to show you the Brazen Serpent that was elevated 
in the wilderness, you could depend upon it that they had on 
hand the pole it was elevated on also, and even the hole it 
stood in. They have got the " Grotto " of the Annunciation 
here; and just as convenient to it as one's throat is to his 
mouth, they have also the Virgin's Kitchen, and even her sit- 
ting-room, where she and Joseph watched the infant Saviour 
play with Hebrew toys eighteen hundred years ago. All un- 
der one roof, and all clean, spacious, comfortable " grottoes." 
It seems curious that personages intimately connected with the 
Holy Family always lived in grottoes — in Nazareth, in Beth- 
lehem, in imperial Ephesus — and yet nobody else in their day 
and generation thought of doing any thing of the kind. If 
they ever did, their grottoes are all gone, and I suppose we 
ought to wonder at the peculiar marvel of the preservation of 
these I speak of. When the Virgin fled from Herod's wrath, 
she hid in a grotto in Bethlehem, and the same is there to this 
day. The slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem was done 
in a grotto ; the Saviour was born in a grotto — both are shown 
to pilgrims yet. It is exceedingly strange that these tremen- 
dous events all happened in grottoes — and exceedingly fortu- 
nate, likewise, because the strongest houses must crumble to 
ruin in time, but a grotto in the living rock will last forever. 
It is an imposture — this grotto stuff — but it is one that all men 
ought to thank the Catholics for. Wherever they ferret out a 
lost locality made holy by some Scriptural event, they straight- 
way build a massive — almost imperishable — church there, and 
preserve the memory of that locality for the gratification of 
future generations. If it had been left to Protestants to do 
this most worthy work, we would not even know where Jeru- 
salem is to-day, and the man who could go and put his finger 
on Nazareth would be too wise for this world. The world 
owes the Catholics its good will even for the happy rascality 



SACRED RELICS. 529 

of hewing out these bogus grottoes in the rock ; for it is infi- 
nitely more satisfactory to look at a grotto, where people have 
faithfully believed for centuries that the Virgin once lived, 
than to have to imagine a dwelling-place for her somewhere, 
any where, nowhere, loose and at large all over this town of 
Nazareth. There is too large a scope of country. The imag- 
ination can not work. There is no one particular spot to chain 
your eye, rivet your interest, and make you think. The mem- 
ory of the Pilgrims can not perish while Plymouth Rock 
remains to us. The old monks are wise. They know how to 
drive a stake through a pleasant tradition that will hold it to 
its place forever. 

We visited the places where Jesus worked for fifteen years 
as a carpenter, and where he attempted to teach in the syna- 
gogue and was driven out by a mob. Catholic chapels stand 
upon these sites and protect the little fragments of the ancient 
walls which remain. Our pilgrims broke off specimens. We 
visited, also, a new chapel, in the midst of the town, which is 
built around a boulder some twelve feet long by four feet 
thick ; the priests discovered, a few years ago, that the disciples 
had sat upon this rock to rest, once, when they had walked up 
from Capernaum. They hastened to preserve the relic. Relics 
are very good property. Travelers are expected to pay for 
seeing them, and they do it cheerfully. We like the idea. 
One's conscience can never be the worse for the knowledge 
that he has paid his way like a man. Our pilgrims would have 
liked very well to get out their lampblack and stencil-plates 
and paint their names on that rock, together with the names 
of the villages they hail from in America, but the priests per- 
mit nothing of that kind. To speak the strict truth, however, 
our party seldom offend in that way, though we have men in 
the ship who never lose an opportunity to do it. Our pilgrims' 
chief sin is their lust for " specimens." I suppose that by this 
time they know the dimensions of that rock to an inch, and its 
weight to a ton ; and I do not hesitate to charge that they 
will go back there to-night and try to carry it off. 

This " Fountain of the Yirgin " is the one which tradition 

34 



530 



QUESTIONABLE FEMALE BEAUTY. 



says Mary used to get water from, twenty times a day, when 
she was a girl, and bear it away in a jar upon her head. The 
water streams through faucets in the face of a wall of ancient 
masonry which stands removed from the houses of the village. 
The young girls of Nazareth still collect about it by the dozen 
and keep up a riotous laughter and sky-larking. The JSTazarene 




FOUNTAIN OF THE VIRGIN. 

girls are homely. Some of them have large, lustrous eyes, but 
none of them have pretty faces. These girls wear a single 
garment, usually, and it is loose, shapeless, of undecided color ; 
it is generally out of repair, too. They wear, from crown to 
jaw, curious strings of old coins, after the manner of the 
belles of Tiberias, and brass jewelry upon their wrists and in 
their ears. They wear no shoes and stockings. They are the 
most human girls we have found in the country yet, and the 
best natured. But there is no question that these picturesque 
maidens sadly lack comeliness. 



PILGRIM- PLAGIARIZING. 



531 



A pilgrim — the "Enthusiast" — said : " See that tall, grace- 
ful girl ! look at the Madonna-like beauty of her countenance !" 

Another pilgrim came along presently and said : "Observe 
that tall, graceful girl ; what queenly Madonna-like graceful- 
ness of beauty is in her countenance." 

I said : " She is not tall, she is short ; she is not beautiful, 
she is home- 
ly ; she is 
graceful 
enough, I 
grant, but 
she is rather 
boisterous." 

The third 
and last pil- 
grim moved 
by, before 
long, and he 
said: "Ah, 
what a tall, 
graceful 
girl ! what 
Madonna- 
like grace- 
fulness of 
queenly 
beauty !" 

The ver- 
dicts were 
all in. It 
was time, 
now, to look 

up the authorities for all these opinions. I found this para- 
graph, which follows. Written by whom % Wm. C. Grimes : 




WHAT MADONNA-LIKE BEAUTY 1' 



"After we were in the saddle, we rode down to the spring to have a last look at 
the women of Nazareth, who were, as a class, much the prettiest that we had seen 
in the East. As we approached the crowd a tall girl of nineteen advanced toward 



532 "nomadic life" literature. 

Miriam and offered her a cup of water. Her movement was graceful and queenly. 
We exclaimed on the spot at the Madonna-like beaut}' of her countenance. White- 
ly was suddenly thirsty, and begged for water, and drank it slowly, with his eyes 
over the top of the cup, fixed on her large black eyes, which gazed on him quite 
as curiously as he on her. Then Moreright wanted water. She gave it to him and 
he managed to spill it so as to ask for another cup, and by the time she came to me 
she saw through the operation ; her eyes wece full of fun as she looked at me. 1 
laughed outright, and she joined me in as gay a shout as ever country maiden in 
old Orange county. I wished for a picture of her. A Madonna, whose face was a 
portrait of that beautiful Nazareth girl, would be a ' thing of beauty ' and ' a joy 
forever.' " 

That is the kind of gruel which has been served out from 
Palestine for ages. Commend me to Fennimore Cooper to find 
beauty in the Indians, and to Grimes to find it in the Arabs. 
Arab men are often fine looking, but Arab women are not. 
"We can all believe that the Virgin Mary was beautiful ; it is 
not natural to think otherwise ; but does it follow that it is 
our duty to find beauty in these present women of J^azareth % 

I love to quote from Grimes, because he is so dramatic. And 
because he is so romantic. And because he seems to care but 
little whether he tells the truth or not, so he scares the reader 
or excites his envy or his admiration. 

He went through this peaceful land with one hand forever 
on his revolver, and the other on his pocket-handkerchief. Al- 
ways, when he was not on the point of crying over a holy 
place, he was on the point of killing an Arab. More surpris- 
ing things happened to him in Palestine than ever happened 
to any traveler here or elsewhere since Munchausen died. 

At Beit Jin, where nobody had interfered with him, he 
crept out of his tent at dead of night and shot at what he 
took to be an Arab lying on a rock, some distance away, plam 
ning evil. The ball killed a wolf. Just before he fired, he 
makes a dramatic picture of himself — as usual, to scare the 
reader : 

" Was it imagination, or did I see a moving object on the surface of the rock ? 
If it were a man, why did he not now drop me? He had a beautiful shot as I 
stood out in my black boornoose against the white tent. I had the sensation of a* 
entering bullet in my throat, breast, brain." 

Reckless creature ! 



NOMADIC LIFE" LITERATURE. 



533 



Riding toward Genessaret, they saw two Bedouins, and " we 
looked to our pistols and loosened them quietly in our shawls," 
etc. Always cool. 

In Samaria, he charged up a hill, in the face of a volley of 
stones ; he fired into the crowd of men who threw them. He 
says : 

" I never lost an opportunity of .impressing the Arabs with the perfection of Amer- 
ican and English weapons, and the danger of attacking any one of the armed 
Franks. I think the lesson of that ball not lost." 

At Beitin he gave his whole band of Arab muleteers a piece 
of his mind, and then — 

" I content- 
ed myself with 
a solemu assu- 
rance that if 
there occurred 
another in- 
stance of diso- 
bedience to 
orders, I 
would thrash 
the responsi- 
ble party as 
he never 
dreamed of 
being thrash- 
ed, and if I 
could not find 
who was re- 
sponsible, I 
would whip 
them all, from 
first to last, 
whether there 
was a govern- 
or at hand to 
do it or I had 
to do it my- 
self." 

PUTNAM OUTDONE. 

Perfectly fearless, this man. 

He rode down the perpendicular path in the rocks, from the 




534 "nomadic life" literature. 

Castle of Banias to the oak grove, at a flying gallop, his horse 
striding " thirty feet " at every bound. I stand prepared to bring 
thirty reliable witnesses to prove that Putnam's famous feat at 
Horseneck was insignificant compared to this. 

Behold him — always theatrical — looking at Jerusalem — this 
time, by an oversight, with his hand off his pistol for once. 

"I stood in the road, my hand on ray horse's neck, and with my dim eyes sought 
to trace the outlines of the holy places which I had long before fixed in my mind, 
but the fast-flowing tears forbade my succeeding. There were our Mohammedan 
servants, a Latin monk, two Armenians and a Jew in our cortege, and all alike 
gazed with overflowing eyes." 

If Latin monks and Arabs cried, I know to a moral certain- 
ty that the horses cried also, and so the picture is complete. 

But when necessity demanded, he could be firm as adamant. 
In the Lebanon Valley an Arab youth — a Christian ; he is par- 
ticular to explain that Mohammedans do not steal — robbed 
him of a paltry ten dollars' worth of powder and shot. He 
convicted him before a sheik and looked on while he was 
punished by the terrible bastinado. Hear him : 

" He (Mousa) was on his back in a twinkling, howling, shouting, screaming, but 
he was carried out to the piazza before the door, where we could see the operation, 
and laid face down. One man sat on his back and one on his legs, the latter hold- 
ing up his feet, while a third laid on the bare soles a rhinoceros-hide koorbash* 
that whizzed through the air at every stroke. Poor Moreright was in agony, and 
Nama and Xama the Second (mother and sister of Mousa,) were on their faces beg- 
ging and wailing, now embracing my knees and now Whitely's, while the brother, 
outside, made the air ring with cries louder than Mousa's. Even Yusef came and 
asked me on his knees to relent, and last of all, Betuni — the rascal had lost a feed- 
bag in their house and had been loudest in his denunciations that morning — be* 
sought thfc Howajji to have mercy on the fellow." 

But not he ! The punishment was " suspended," at the fif- 
teenth blow, to hear the confession. Then Grimes and his party 
rode away, and left the entire Christian family to be fined and 
as severely punished as the Mohammedan sheik should deem 
proper. 

* " A Koorbash is Arabic for cowhide, the cow being a rhinoceros. It is the most cruel whip known to fame. 
Heavy as lead, and flexible as India-rubber, usually about forty inches long and tapering gradually from an inch 
io diameter to a point, it administers a blow which leaves its mark for time." — Scow Life in Egypt, by the 
same author. 



• 



NOMADIC LIFE' LITERATURE 



535 



" As I mounted, Yusef once more begged me to interfere and have mercy on 
them, but I looked around at the dark faces of the crowd, and I couldn't find one 
drop of pity in my heart for them." 

He closes his picture with a rollicking burst of humor which 
contrasts finely with the grief of the mother and her children. 




THE BASTINADO. 



One more paragraph : 

" Then once more I bowed my head. It is no shame to have wept in Palestine. 
I wept, when I saw Jerusalem, I wept when I lay in the starlight at Bethlehem, I 
wept on the blessed shores of Galilee. My hand was no less firm on the rein, my 
finger did not tremble on the trigger of my pistol when I rode with it in my right 
hand along the shore of the blue sea" (weeping.) " My eye was not dimmed by 
those tears nor my heart in aught weakened. Let him who would sneer at my 
emotion close this volume here, for he will find little to his taste in my journeyings 
through Holy Land." 

He never bored but he struck water. 



536 



NOMADIC LIFE LITERATURE 



I am aware that this is a pretty Yoluminoiis notice of Mr. 
Grimes' book. However, it is proper and legitimate to speak 
of it, for t; Xomadic Life in Palestine" is a representative book 
— the representative of a class of Palestine books — and a criti- 




I WEPT. 



cism upon it will serve for a criticism upon them all. And 
since I am treating it in the comprehensive capacity of a rep- 
resentative book, I have taken the liberty of giving to both 
book and author fictitious names. Perhaps it is in better taste, 
any how, to do this. 



OHAPTEE LI. 



NAZARETH is wonderfully interesting because the town 
has an air about it of being precisely as Jesus left it, 
and one finds himself saying, all the time, " The boy Jesus has 
stood in this doorway — has played in that street — has touched 
these stones with his hands — Las rambled over these chalky 
hills." Whoever shall write the Boyhood of Jesus ingenious- 
ly, will make a book which will possess a vivid interest for 
young and old alike. I judge so from the greater interest we 
found in Nazareth than any of our speculations upon Caper- 
naum and the Sea of Galilee gave rise to. It was not possible, 
standing by the Sea of Galilee, to frame more than a vague, 
far-away idea of the majestic Personage who walked upon the 
crested waves as if they had been solid earth, and who touched 
the dead and they rose up and spoke. I read among my notes, 
now, with a new interest, some sentences from an edition of 
1621 of the Apocryphal New Testament. [Extract.] 

" Christ, kissed by a bride made dumb by sorcerers, cures her. A leprous girl 
cured by the water in which the infant Christ was washed, and becomes the servant 
of Joseph and Mary. The leprous son of a Prince cured in like manner. 

"A young man who had beeu bewitched and turned into a mule, miraculously 
cured by the infant Saviour being put on his back, and is married to the girl who 
had been cured of leprosy. Whereupon the bystanders praise God. 

"Chapter 16. Christ miraculously widens or contracts gates, milk-pails, sieves or 
boxes, not properly made by Joseph, he not being skillful at his carpenter's trade. 
The King of Jerusalem gives Joseph an order for a throne. Joseph works on it 
for two years and makes it two spans too short. The King being angry with him, 
Jesus comforts him — commands him to pull one side of the throne while he pulls 
the other, and brings it to its proper dimensions. 

"Chapter 19. Jesus, charged with throwing a boy from the roof of a house, mi- 



538 DISCARDED LORE. 

raculously causes the dead boy to speak and acquit him ; fetches water for his 
mother, breaks the pitcher and miraculously gathers the water in his mantle and 
brings it home. 

<l Sent to a schoolmaster, refuses to tell his letters, and the schoolmaster going to 
whip him, his hand withers." 

Further on in this quaint volume of rejected gospels is an 
epistle of St. Clement to the Corinthians, which was used in 
the churches and considered genuine fourteen or fifteen hun- 
dred years ago. In it this account of the fabled phoenix oc- 
curs: 

" 1. Let us consider that wonderful type of the resurrection, which is seen in the 
Eastern countries, that is to say, in Arabia. 

" 2. There is a certain bird called a phoenix. Of this there is never but one at a 
time, and that lives five hundred 3 r ears. And when the time of its dissolution 
draws near, that it must die, it makes itself a nest of frankincense, and myrrh, and 
other spices, into which, when its time is fulfilled, it enters and dies. 

"3. But its flesh, putrefying, breeds a certain worm, which, being nourished by 
the juice of the dead bird, brings forth feathers; and when it is grown to a perfect 
state, it takes up the nest in which the bones of its parent lie, and carries it from 
Arabia into Egypt, to a city called Heliopolis : 

"4. And flying in open day in the sight of all men, lays it upon the altar of the 
sun. and so returns from whence it came. 

" 5. The priests then search into the records of the time, and find that it returned 
precisely at the end of five hundred years." 

Business is business, and there is nothing like punctuality, 
especially in a phoenix. 

The few chapters relating to the infancy of the Saviour con- 
tain many things which seem frivolous and not worth preserv- 
ing. A large part of the remaining portions of the book read 
like good Scripture, however. There is one verse that ought 
not to have been rejected, because it so evidently prophetically 
refers to the general run of Congresses of the United States : 

"199. They carry themselves high, and as prudent men; and though they are 
fools, yet would seem to be teachers." 

I have set these extracts down, as I found them. Every 
where, among the cathedrals of France and Italy, one finds 
traditions of personages that do not figure in the Bible, and 
of miracles that are not mentioned in its pages. But they are 



SYRIAN TURNPIKE 



539 






all in this Apocryphal New Testament, and though they have 
been ruled out of our modern Bible, it is claimed that they 
were accepted gospel twelve or fifteen centuries ago, and 
ranked as high in credit as any. One needs to read this book 
before he visits those venerable cathedrals, with their treasures 
of tabooed and forgotten tradition. 

They imposed another pirate upon us at Nazareth — another 
invincible Arab guard. We took our last look at the city, 
clinging like a whitewashed wasp's nest to the hill-side, and at 
eight o'clock in the morning, departed. We dismounted and 

drove the 

horses down 
a bridle- 
path which 
I think was 
fully as 
crooked as a 
corkscrew ; 
which I 
know to be 
as steep as 
the down- 
ward sweep 
of a rain- 
bow, and 
which I be- 
lieve to be 
the worst 
piece of 
geography, except 
Sandwich Islands, 
which I remember painfully, 
and possibly one or two moun- 
tain trails in the Sierra Ne- 
vadas. Often, in this narrow 
path, the horse had to poise 
himself nicely on a rude stone step and then drop his fore-feet 




WANT OF DIGNITY. 



540 DANGEROUS PILGRIMS. 

over the edge and down something more than half his own 
height. This brought his nose near the ground, while his tail 
pointed up toward the sky somewhere, and gave him the ap- 
pearance of preparing to stand on his head. A horse can not 
look dignified in this position. We accomplished the long de- 
scent at last, and trotted across the great Plain of Esdraelon. 

Some of us will be shot before we finish this pilgrimage. 
The pilgrims read " Nomadic Life " and keep themselves in a 
constant state of Quixotic heroism. They have their hands on 
their pistols all the time, and every now and then, when you 
least expect it, they snatch them out and take aim at Bedouins 
who are not visible, and draw their knives and make savage 
passes at other Bedouins who do not exist. I am in deadly 
peril always, for these spasms are sudden and irregular, and 
of course I can not tell when to be getting out of the way. 
If I am accidentally murdered, some time, during one of these 
romantic frenzies of the pilgrims, Mr. Grimes must be rigidly 
held to answer as an accessory before the fact. If the pilgrims 
would take deliberate aim and shoot at a man, it would be all 
right and proper — because that man would not be in any dan- 
ger ; but these random assaults are what I object to. I do not 
wish to see any more places like Esdraelon, where the ground 
is level and people can gallop. It puts melodramatic nonsense 
into the pilgrims' heads. All at once, when one is '•ogging 
along stupidly in the sun, and thinking about something ever 
so far away, here they come, at a stormy gallop, spurring and 
whooping at those ridgy old sore-backed plugs till their heels 
fly higher than their heads, and as they whiz by, out comes a 
little potato-gun of a revolver, there is a startling little pop, 
and a small pellet goes singing through the air. ISTow that I 
have begun this pilgrimage, I intend to go through with it, 
though sooth to say, nothing but the most desperate valor has 
kept me to my purpose up to the present time. I do not mind 
Bedouins, — I am not afraid of them ; because neither Bedouins 
nor ordinary Arabs have shown any disposition to harm us, 
but I do feel afraid of my own comrades. 

Arriving at the furthest verse of the Plain, we rode a little 



HOME OF THE GREAT WITCH. 541 

way up a hill and found ourselves at Endor, famous for its 
witch. Her descendants are there yet. They were the wildesc 
horde of half-naked savages we have found thus far. They 
swarmed out of mud bee-hives ; out of hovels of the dry-goods 
box pattern ; out of gaping caves under shelving rocks ; out 
of crevices in the earth. In five minutes the dead solitude and 
silence of the place were no more, and a begging, screeching, 
shouting mob were struggling about the horses' feet and block- 
ing the way. " Bucksheesh ! bucksheesh ! bucksheesh ! how- 
ajji, bucksheesh !" It was Magdala over again, only here the 
glare from the infidel eyes was fierce and full of hate. The 
population numbers two hundred and fifty, and more than 
half the citizens live in caves in the rock. Dirt, degradation 
and savagery are Endor's specialty. We say no more about 
Magdala and Deburieh now. Endor heads the list. It is worse 
than any Indian campoodie. The hill is barren, rocky, and for- 
bidding. No sprig of grass is visible, and only one tree. This 
is a fig-tree, which maintains a precarious footing among the 
rocks at the mouth of the dismal cavern once occupied by the 
veritable Witch of Endor. In this cavern, tradition says, Saul, 
the King, sat at midnight, and stared and trembled, while the 
earth shook, the thunders crashed among the hills, and out of 
the midst of fire and smoke the spirit of the dead prophet rose 
up and confronted him. Saul had crept to this place in the 
darkness, while his army slept, to learn what fate awaited him 
in the morrow's battle. He went away a sad man, to meet 
disgrace and death. 

A spring trickles out of the rock in the gloomy recesses of 
the cavern, and we were thirsty. The citizens of Endor ob- 
jected to our going in there. They do not mind dirt ; they do 
not mind rags ; they do not mind vermin ; they do not mind 
barbarous ignorance and savagery ; they do not mind a reason- 
able degree of starvation, but they do like to be pure and holy 
before their god, whoever he may be, and therefore they shud- 
der and grow almost pale at the idea of Christian lips pollu- 
ting a spring whose waters must descend into their sanctified 
gullets. We had no wanton desire to wound even their feel- 



542 N A I N . 

ings or trample upon their prejudices, but we were out of 
water, thus early in the day, and were burning up with thirst. 
It was at this time, and under these circumstances, that I 
framed an aphorism which has already become celebrated. I 
said : " Necessity knows no law." We went in and drank. 

We got away from the noisy wretches, finally, dropping 
them in squads and couples as we filed over the hills — the aged 
first, the infants next, the young girls further on ; the strong 
men ran beside us a mile, and only left when they had secured 
the last possible piastre in the way of bucksheesh. 

In an hour, we reached Nain, where Christ raised the 
widow's son to life. Nain is Magdala on a small scale. It has 
no population of any consequence. Within a hundred yards 
of it is the original graveyard, for aught I know ; the tomb- 
stones lie flat on the ground, which is Jewish fashion in Syria. 
I believe the Moslems do not allow them to have upright 
tombstones. A Moslem grave is usually roughly plastered 
over and whitewashed, and has at one end an upright projec- 
tion which is shaped into exceedingly rude attempts at orna- 
mentation. In the cities, there is often no appearance of a 
grave at all ; a tall, slender marble tombstone, elaborately let- 
tred, gilded and painted, marks the burial place, and this is 
surmounted by a turban, so carved and shaped as to signify 
the dead man's rank in life. 

They showed a fragment of ancient wall which they said 
was one side of the gate out of which the widow's dead son 
was being brought so many centuries ago when Jesus met the 
procession : 

"Now when he came nigh to the gate of the city, behold there was a dead man 
carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow : and much people 
of the city was with her. 

" And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her, and said, Weep not. 

" And he came and touched the bier : and they that bare him stood still. And 
he said, Young man, I say unto thee, arise. 

" And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak. And he delivered him to 
his mother. 

" And there came a fear on all. And they glorified God, saying, That a great 
prophet is risen up among us; and That God Lath visited his people." 



ORIENTAL SCENES. 543 

A little mosque stands upon the spot which tradition says 
was occupied by the widow's dwelling. Two or three aged 
Arabs sat about its door. We entered, and the pilgrims broke 
specimens from the foundation walls, though they had to touch, 
and even step, upon the " praying carpets " to do it. It was 
almost the same as breaking pieces from the hearts of those 
old Arabs. To step rudely upon the sacred praying mats, with 
booted feet — a thing not done by any Arab — was to inflict 
pain upon men who had not offended us in any way. Sup- 
pose a party of armed foreigners were to enter a village church 
in America and break ornaments from the altar railings for 
curiosities, and climb up and walk upon the Bible and the pul- 
pit cushions ? However, the cases are different. One is the 
profanation of a temple of our faith — the other only the profa- 
nation of a pagan one. 

We descended to the Plain again, and halted a moment at a 
well — of Abraham's time, no doubt. It was in a desert place. 
It was walled three feet above ground with squared and heavy 
blocks of stone, after the manner of Bible pictures. Around 
it some camels stood, and others knelt. There was a group of 
sober little donkeys with naked, dusky children clambering 
about them, or sitting astride their rumps, or pulling their 
tails. Tawny, black-eyed, barefooted maids, arrayed in rags 
and adorned with brazen armlets and pinchbeck ear-rings, were 
poising water-jars upon their heads, or drawing water from the 
well. A flock of sheep stood by, waiting for the shepherds to 
fill the hollowed stones with water, so that they might drink — 
stones which, like those that walled the well, were worn 
smooth and deeply creased by the chafing chins of a hundred 
generations of thirsty animals. Picturesque Arabs sat upon 
the ground, in groups, and solemnly smoked their long- 
stemmed chibouks. Other Arabs were filling black hog-skins 
with water — skins which, well filled, and distended with water 
till the short legs projected painfully out of the proper line, 
looked like the corpses of hogs bloated by drowning. Here 
was a grand Oriental picture which I had worshiped a thou- 
sand times in soft, rich steel engravings ! But in the engra- 



544 



ORIENTAL SCENES 



ving there was no desolation ; no dirt ; no rags ; no fleas ; no 
ugly features ; no sore eyes ; no feasting flies ; no besotted ig- 
norance in the countenances; no raw places on the donkeys' 
backs ; no disagreeable jabbering in unknown tongues ; no 
stench of camels ; no suggestion that a couple of tons of pow- 




AN ORIENTAL WELL. 



der placed under the party and touched off would heighten the 
effect and give to the scene a genuine interest and a charm 
which it would always be pleasant to recall, even though a 
man lived a thousand years. 

Oriental scenes look best in steel engravings. I can not be 
imposed upon any more by that picture of the Queen of Sheba 
visiting Solomon. I shall say to myself, You look fine, Mad- 
am, but your feet are not clean, and you smell like a camel 



THE ORIENTAL KISS. 



545 




ARABS SALUTING. 



Presently a wild Arab in charge of a camel train recognized 
an old friend in Ferguson, and they ran and fell upon each 
other's necks and kissed 
each other's grimy, 
bearded faces upon both 
cheeks. It explained 
instantly a something 
which had always seem- 
ed to me only a far- 
fetched Oriental figure 
of speech. I refer to the 
circumstance of Christ's 
rebuking a Pharisee, or 
some such character, and 
reminding him that from 

him he had received no " kiss of welcome." It did not seem 
reasonable to me that men should kiss each other, but I am 
aware, now, that they did. There was reason in it, too. The 
custom was natural and proper ; because people must kiss, and 
a man would not be likely to kiss one of the women of this 
country of his own free will and accord. One must travel, to 
learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never pos- 
sessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a 
meaning. 

We journeyed around the base of the mountain — " Little 
Hermon," — past the old Crusaders' castle of El Fuleh, and 
arrived at Shun em. This was another Magdala, to a fraction, 
frescoes and all. Here, tradition says, the prophet Samuel was 
born, and here the Shunamite woman built a little house upon 
the city waJ for the accommodation of the prophet Elisha. 
Elisha asked her what she expected in return. It was a per- 
fectly natural question, for these people are and were in the 
habit of proffering favors and services and then expecting and 
begging for pay. Elisha knew them well. He could not com- 
prehend that any body should build for him that humble little 
chamber for the mere sake of old friendship, and with no selfish 
motive whatever. It used to seem a very impolite, not to say 

35 



64:6 



THE SHUNEM MIRACLE. 



a rude question, for Elisha to ask the woman, but it does not 
seem so to me now. The woman said she expected nothing. 
Then for her goodness and her unselfishness, he rejoiced her 
heart with the news that she should bear a son. It was a high 
reward— but she would not have thanked him for a daughter 
—daughters have always been unpopular here. The son was 
born, grew, waxed strong, died. Elisha restored him to life 

in Shunem. 

We found here a grove of lemon trees— cool, shady, hung 
with fruit. One is apt to overestimate beauty when it is rare, 
but to me this grove seemed very beautiful. It ivas beautiful. 
I do not overestimate it. I must always remember Shunem 
gratefully, as a place which gave to us this leafy shelter after 
our long, hot ride. We lunched, rested, chatted, smoked our 
pipes an hour, and then mounted and moved on. 




FREE SONS OF THE DESERT. 



As we trotted across the Plain of Jezreel, we met half a 
dozen Digger Indians (Bedouins) with very long spears in their 



J E Z R E E L . 547 

hands, cavorting around on old crowbait horses, and spearing 
imaginary enemies ; whooping, and fluttering their rags in the 
wind, and carrying on in every respect like a pack of hopeless 
lunatics. At last, here were the "wild, free sons of the desert, 
speeding over the plain like the wind, on their beautiful Ara- 
bian mares " we had read so much about and longed so much 
to see ! Here were the " picturesque costumes !" This was 
the " gallant spectacle !" Tatterdemalion vagrants — cheap 
braggadocio — " Arabian mares " spined and necked like the 
ichthyosaurus in the museum, and humped and cornered like 
a dromedary ! To glance at the genuine son of the desert is 
to take the romance out of him forever — to behold his steed is 
to long in charity to strip his harness off and let him fall to 
pieces. 

Presently we came to a ruinous old town on a hill, the same 
being the ancient Jezreel. 

Ahab, King of Samaria, (this was a very vast kingdom, for 
those days, and was very nearly half as large as Rhode Island) 
dwelt in the city of Jezreel, which was his capital. Near him 
lived a man by the name of Naboth, who had a vineyard. The 
King asked him for it, and when he would not give it, offered 
to buy it. But Naboth refused to sell it. In those days it was 
considered a sort of crime to part with one's inheritance at any 
price — and even if a man did part with it, it reverted to him- 
self or his heirs again at the next jubilee year. So this spoiled 
child of a King went and lay down on the bed with his face to> 
the wall, and grieved sorely. The Queen, a notorious character 
in those days, and whose name is a by-word and a reproach 
even in these, came in and asked him wherefore he sorrowed, 
and he told her. Jezebel said she could secure the vineyard ; 
and she went forth and forged letters to the nobles and wise 
men, in the King's name, and ordered them to proclaim a fast 
and set Naboth on high before the people, and suborn two wit- 
nesses to swear that he had blasphemed. They did it, and the 
people stoned the accused by the city wall, and he died. Then 
Jezebel came and told the King, and said, Behold, Naboth is 
no more — rise up and seize the vineyard. So Ahab seized the 



548 THE CHURCH MILITANT. 

vineyard, and went into it to possess it. But the Prophet Eli- 
jah came to him there and read his fate to him, and the fate 
of Jezebel ; and said that in the place where dogs licked the 
blood of Kaboth, dogs should also lick his blood — and he said, 
likewise, the dogs should eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel. 
In the course of time, the King was killed in battle, and when 
his chariot wheels were washed in the pool of Samaria, the 
dogs licked the blood. In after years, Jehu, who was King of 
Israel, marched down against Jezreel, by order of one of the 
Prophets, and administered one of those convincing rebukes so 
common among the people of those days : he killed many 
kings and their subjects, and as he came along he saw Jezebel, 
painted and finely dressed, looking out of a window, and or- 
dered that she be thrown down to him. A servant did it, and 
Jehu's horse trampled her under foot. Then Jehu went in and 
sat down to dinner ; and presently he said, Go and bury this 
cursed woman, for she is a King's daughter. The spirit of 
charity came upon him too late, however, for the prophecy had 
already been fulfilled — the dogs had eaten her, and they 
" found no more of her than the skull, and the feet, and the 
palms of her hands." 

Ahab, the late King, had left a helpless family behind him, 
and Jehu killed seventy of the orphan sons. Then he killed 
all the relatives, and teachers, and servants and friends of the 
family, and rested from his labors, until he was come near to 
Samaria, where he met forty-two persons and asked them who 
they were ; they said they were brothers of the King of Judah. 
He killed them. When he got to Samaria, he said he would 
show his zeal for the Lord ; so he gathered all the priests and 
people together that worshiped Baal, pretending that he was 
going to adopt that worship and offer up a great sacrifice ; and 
when they were all shut up where they could not defend them- 
selves, he caused every person of them to be killed. Then 
Jehu, the good missionary, rested from his labors once more. 

We went back to the valley, and rode to the Fountain of 
Ain Jelud. They call it the Fountain of Jezreel, usually. It 
is a pond about one hundred feet square and four feet deep, 



BAND — SAMARIA. 549 

with a stream of water trickling into it from under an over- 
hanging ledge of rocks. It is in the midst of a great solitude. 
Here Gideon pitched his camp in the old times ; behind Shu- 
nem lay the " Midianites, the Amalekites, and the Children of 
the East," who were " as grasshoppers for multitude ; both 
they and their camels were without number, as the sand by 
the sea-side for multitude." Which means that there were one 
hundred and thirty-five thousand men, and that they had 
transportation service accordingly. 

Gideon, with only three hundred men, surprised them in the 
night, and stood by and looked on while they butchered each 
other until a hundred and twenty thousand lay dead on the 
field. 

We camped at Jenin before night, and got up and started 
again at one o'clock in the morning. Somewhere towards 
daylight we passed the locality where the best authenticated 
tradition locates the pit into which Joseph's brethren threw 
him, and about noon, after passing over a succession of moun- 
tain tops, clad with groves of fig and olive trees, with the Med- 
iterranean in sight some forty miles away, and going by many 
ancient Biblical cities whose inhabitants glowered savagely 
upon our Christian procession, and were seemingly inclined to 
practice on it with stones, we came to the singularly terraced 
and unlovely hills that betrayed that we were out of Galilee 
and into Samaria at last. 

We climbed a high hill to visit the city of Samaria, where 
the woman may have hailed from who conversed with Christ 
at Jacob's Well, and from whence, no doubt, came also the cel- 
ebrated Good Samaritan. Herod the Great is said to have 
made a magnificent city of this place, and a great number of 
coarse limestone columns, twenty feet high and two feet 
through, that are almost guiltless of architectural grace of 
shape and ornament, are pointed out by many authors as evi- 
dence of the fact. They would not have been considered 
handsome in ancient Greece, however. 

The inhabitants of this camp are particularly vicious, and 
stoned two parties of our pilgrims a day or two ago who 



550 SAMARIA. 

brought about the difficulty by showing their revolvers when 
they did not intend to use them — a thing which is deemed bad 
judgment in the Far West, and ought certainly to be so con- 
sidered any where. In the new Territories, when a man puts 
his hand on a weapon, he knows that he must use it ; he must 
use it instantly or expect to be shot down where he stands. 
Those pilgrims had been reading Grimes. 

There was nothing for us to do in Samaria but buy handfuls 
of old Roman coins at a franc a dozen, and look at a dilapi- 
dated church of the Crusaders and a vault in it which once 
contained the body of John the Baptist. This relic was long 
ago carried away to Genoa. 

Samaria stood a disastrous siege, once, in the days of Elisha, 
at the hands of the King of Syria. Provisions reached such a 
figure that " an ass' head was sold for eighty pieces of silver 
and the fourth part of a cab of dove's dung for five pieces of 
silver." 

An incident recorded of that heavy time will give one a 
very good idea of the distress that prevailed within these 
crumbling walls. As the King was walking upon the battle- 
ments one day, " a woman cried out, saying, Help, my lord, O 
King ! And the King said, What aileth thee ? and she an- 
swered, This woman said unto me, Give thy son, that we may 
eat him to-day, and we will eat my son to-morrow. So we 
boiled my son, and did eat him ; and I said unto her on the 
next day, Give thy son that we may eat him ; and she hath 
hid her son." 

The prophet Elisha declared that within four and twenty 
hours the prices of food should go down to nothing, almost, 
and it was so. The Syrian army broke camp and fled, for some 
cause or other, the famine was relieved from without, and many 
a shoddy speculator in dove's dung and ass's meat was ruined. 

We were glad to leave this hot and dusty old village and 
hurry on. At two o'clock we stopped to lunch and rest at an- 
cient Shechem, between the historic Mounts of Gerizim and 
Ebal where in the old times the books of the law, the curses 
and the blessings, were read frcm the heights to the Jewish 
multitudes below. 



OHAPTEE LII 



THE narrow canon in which Nablous, or Shechem, is situ- 
ated, is under high cultivation, and the soil is exceed- 
ingly black and fertile. It is well watered, and its affluent 
vegetation gains effect by contrast with the barren hills that 
tower on either side. One of these hills is the ancient Mount 
of Blessings and the other the Mount of Curses ; and wise men 
who seek for fulfillments of prophecy think they find here a 
wonder of this kind — to wit, that the Mount of Blessings is 
strangely fertile and its mate as strangely unproductive. We 
could not see that there was really much difference between 
them in this respect, however. 

Shechem is distinguished as one of the residences of the pa- 
triarch Jacob, and as the seat of those tribes that cut them- 
selves loose from their brethren of Israel and propagated doc- 
trines not in conformity with those of the original Jewish 
creed. For thousands of years this clan have dwelt in Shechem 
under strict tabu, and having little commerce or fellowship 
with their fellow men of any religion or nationality, For gen- 
erations they have not numbered more than one or two hun- 
dred, but they still adhere to their ancient faith and maintain 
their ancient rites and ceremonies. Talk of family and old 
descent ! Princes and nobles pride themselves upon lineages 
they can trace back some hundreds of years. What is this 
trifle to this handful of old first families of Shechem, who can 
name their fathers straight back without a flaw for thousands 
— straight back to a period so remote that men reared in a 
country where the days of two hundred years ago are called 



552 



THE OLDEST MSS. EXTANT. 



" ancient " times grow dazed and bewildered when they try to 
comprehend it! Here is respectability for you — here is "fam- 
ily" — here is high descent worth talking about. This sad, 
proud remnant of a once mighty community still hold them- 
selves aloof from all the world ; they still live as their fathers 
lived, labor as their fathers labored, think as they did, feel as 
they did, worship in the same place, in sight of the same land- 
marks, and in the same quaint, patriarchal way their ancestors 
did more than thirty centuries ago. I found myself gazing at 
any straggling scion of this strange race with a riveted fasci- 
nation, just as one would stare at a living mastodon, or a meg- 
atherium that had moved in the grey dawn of creation and 
seen the wonders of that mysterious world that was before the 
flood. 

Carefully preserved among the sacred archives of this curious 

community is 
a MSS. copy 
of the ancient 
Jewish law, 
which is said 
to be the old- 
est document 
on earth. It 
is written on 
vellum, and is 
some four or 
five thousand 
years old. 
Nothing but 
bucksheesh 
can purchase a sight. Its fame is somewhat dimmed in these 
latter days, because of the doubts so many authors of Palestine 
travels have felt themselves privileged to cast upon it. Speak, 
ing of this MSS. reminds me that I procured from the high- 
priest of this ancient Samaritan community, at great expense, a 
secret document of still higher antiquity and far more extraor- 
dinary interest, which I propose to publish as soon as I have 
finished translating it. 




SHECHEM. 



JOSEPH'S TOMB — JACOB'S WELL. 553 

Joslma gave his dying injunction to the children of Israel at 
Shechem, and buried a valuable treasure secretly under an oak 
tree there about the same time. The superstitious Samaritans 
have always been afraid to hunt for it. They believe it is 
guarded by fierce spirits invisible to men. 

About a mile and a half from Shechem we halted at the 
base of Mount Ebal, before a little square area, inclosed by a 
high stone wall, neatly whitewashed. Across one end of this 
inclosure is a tomb built after the manner of the Moslems. It 
is the tomb of Joseph. No truth is better authenticated than 
this. 

When Joseph was dying he prophesied that exodus of the 
Israelites from Egypt which occurred four hundred years after- 
wards. At the same time he exacted of his people an oath 
that when they journeyed to the land of Canaan, they would 
bear his bones with them and bury them in the ancient inher- 
itance of his fathers. The oath was kept. 

"And the bones of Joseph, which the children of Israel brought up out of Egypt, 
buried they in Shechem, in a parcel of ground which Jacob bought of the sons of 
Hamor the father of Shechem, for a hundred pieces of silver." 

Few tombs on earth command the veneration of so many 
races and men of divers creeds as this of Joseph. " Samaritan 
and Jew, Moslem and Christian alike, revere it, and honor it 
with their visits. The tomb of Joseph, the dutiful son, the 
affectionate, forgiving brother, the virtuous man, the wise 
Prince and ruler. Egypt felt his influence — the world knows 
his history." 

In this same "parcel of ground " which Jacob bought of the 
sons of Hamor for a hundred pieces of silver, is Jacob's cele- 
brated well. It is cut in the solid rock, and is nine feet square 
and ninety feet deep. The name of this unpretending hole in 
the ground, which one might pass by and take no notice of, is 
as familiar as household words to even the children and the 
peasants of many a far-off country. It is more famous than 
the Parthenon ; it is older than the Pyramids. 

It was by this well that Jesus sat and talked with a woman 



554 CAMPING WITH THE ARABS. 

of that strange, antiquated Samaritan community I have been 
speaking of, and told her of the mysterious water of life. As 
descendants of old English nobles still cherish in the traditions 
of their houses how that this king or that king tarried a day 
with some favored ancestor three hundred years ago, no doubt 
the descendants of the woman of Samaria, living there in She- 
chem, still refer with pardonable vanity to this conversation of 
their ancestor, held some little time gone by, with the Messiah 
of the Christians. It is not likely that they undervalue a dis- 
tinction such as this. Samaritan nature is human nature, and 
human nature remembers contact -with the illustrious, always. 

For an offense done to the family honor, the sons of Jacob 
exterminated all Shechem once. 

We left Jacob's Well and traveled till eight in the evening, 
but rather slowly, for we had been in the saddle nineteen 
hours, and the horses were cruelly tired. We got so far ahead 
of the tents that we had to camp in an Arab village, and sleep 
on the ground. We could have slept in the largest of the 
houses ; but there were some little drawbacks : it was populous 
with vermin, it had a dirt floor, it was in no respect cleanly, 
and there was a family of goats in the only bedroom, and two 
donkeys in the parlor. Outside there were no inconveniences, 
except that the dusky, ragged, earnest-eyed villagers of both 
sexes and all ages grouped themselves on their haunches all 
around us, and discussed us and criticised us with noisy tongues 
till midnight. We did not mind the noise, being tired, but, 
doubtless, the reader is aware that it is almost an impossible 
thing to go to sleep when you know that people are looking at 
you. We went to bed at ten, and got up again at two and 
started once more. Thus are people persecuted by dragomen, 
whose sole ambition in life is to get ahead of each other. 

About daylight we passed Shiloh, where the Ark of the Cov- 
enant rested three hundred years, and at whose gates good old 
Eli fell down and "brake his neck" when the messenger, 
riding hard from the battle, told him of the defeat of his peo- 
ple, the death of his sons, and, more than all, the capture of 
Israel's pride, her hope, her refuge, the ancient Ark her fore- 



— 



555 

fathers brought with them out of Egypt. It is little wonder 
that under circumstances like these he fell down and brake his 
neck. But Shiloh had no charms for us. We were so cold 
that there was no comfort but in motion, and so drowsy 
we could hardly sit upon the horses. 

After a while we came to a shapeless mass of ruins, which 
still bears the name of Beth-el. It was here that Jacob lay 
down and had that superb vision of angels flitting up and 
down a ladder that reached from the clouds to earth, and 
caught glimpses of their blessed home through the open gates 
of Heaven. 

The pilgrims took what was left of the hallowed ruin, and 
we pressed on toward the goal of our crusade, renowned Jeru- 
salem. 

The further we went the hotter the sun got, and the more 
rocky and bare, repulsive and dreary the landscape became. 
There could not have been more fragments of stone strewn 
broadcast over this part of the world, if every ten square feet 
of the land had been occupied by a separate and distinct stone- 
cutter's establishment for an age. There was hardly a tree or 
a shrub any where. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast 
friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country. 
Ko landscape exists that is more tiresome to the eye than that 
which bounds the approaches to Jerusalem. The only differ- 
ence between the roads and the surrounding country, perhaps, 
is that there are rather more rocks in the roads than in the 
surrounding country. 

We passed Ramah, and Beroth, and on the right saw the 
tomb of the prophet Samuel, perched high upon a command- 
ing eminence. Still no Jerusalem came in sight. We hurried 
on impatiently. We halted a moment at the ancient Fountain 
of Beira, but its stones, worn deeply by the chins of thirsty 
animals that are dead and gone centuries ago, had no interest 
for us — we longed to see Jerusalem. We spurred up hill after 
hill, and usually began to stretch our necks minutes before wp 
got to the top — but disappointment always followed : — more 
stupid hills beyond — more unsightly landscape — no Holy City. 



556 



JERUSALEM. 



At last, away in the middle of the day, ancient bits of wall 
and crumbling arches began to line the way — we toiled np one 
more hill, and every pilgrim and every sinner swung his hat 
on high ! Jerusalem ! 

Perched on its eternal hills, white and domed and solid, 
massed together and hooped with high gray walls, the vener- 
able city gleamed in the sun. So small ! Why, it was no 
larger than an American village of four thousand inhabitants, 
and no larger than an ordinary Syrian city of thirty thousand. 
Jerusalem numbers only fourteen thousand people. 

We dismounted and looked, without speaking a dozen sen- 
tences, across the wide intervening valley for an hour or more ; 
and noted those prominent features of the city that pictures 
make familiar to all men from their school days till their 
death. We could recognize the Tower of Hippicus, the 
Mosque of Omar, the Damascus Gate, the Mount of Olives. 




GATE OF JERUSALEM. 



the Yalley of Jehoshaphat, the Tower of David, and the Gar- 
den of Gethsemane — and dating from these landmarks could 
tell very nearly the localities of many others we were not able 



to distinguish. 



JERUSALEM. 557 

I record it here as a notable but not discreditable fact that 
Bot even our pilgrims wept. I think there was no individual 
in the party whose brain was not teeming with thoughts and 
images and memories invoked by the grand history of the ven- 
erable city that lay before us, but still among them all was no 
K voice of them that wept." 

There was no call for tears. Tears would have been out of 
place. The thoughts Jerusalem suggests are full of poetry, 
sublimity, and more than all, dignity. Such thoughts do not 
find their appropriate expression in the emotions of the 
nursery. 

Just after noon we entered these narrow, crooked streets, 
by the ancient and the famed Damascus Gate, and now for 
several hours I have been trying to comprehend that I am 
actually in the illustrious old city where Solomon dwelt, where 
Abraham held converse with the Deity, and where walls still 
stand that witnessed the spectacle of the Crucifixion. 



CHAPTER LIII. 

A FAST walker could go outside the walls of Jerusalem 
and walk entirely around the city in an hour. I do not 
know how else to make one understand how small it is. The 
appearance of the city is peculiar. It is as knobby with count- 
less little domes as a prison door is with bolt-heads. Every 
house has from one to half a dozen of these white plastered 
domes of stone, broad and low, sitting in the centre of, or in a 
cluster upon, the flat roof. Wherefore, when one looks down 
from an eminence, upon the compact mass of houses (so close- 
ly crowded together, in fact, that there is no appearance of 
streets at all, and so the city looks solid,) he sees the knobbiest 
town in the world, except Constantinople. It looks as if it 
might be roofed, from centre to circumference, with inverted 
saucers. The monotony of the view is interrupted only by the 
great Mosque of Omar, the Tower of Hippicus, and one or two 
other buildings that rise into commanding prominence. 

The houses are generally two stories high, built strongly of 
masonry, whitewashed or plastered outside, and have a cage 
of wooden lattice-work projecting in front of eyerj window. 
To reproduce a Jerusalem street, it would only be necessary to 
up-end a chicken-coop and hang it before each window in an 
alley of American houses. 

The streets are roughly and badly paved with stone, and 
are tolerably crooked — enough so to make each street appear 
to close together constantly and come to an end about a hun- 
dred yards ahead of a pilgrim as long as he chooses to walk in 
it. Projecting from the top of the lower story of many of the 



JERUSALEM. 



559 



houses is a very narrow porch-roof or shed, without supports 
frorn below ; and I have several times seen cats jump across 
the street from one shed to the other when they were out call- 
ing. The cats could have jumped double the distance without 
extraordinary exertion. I mention these things to give an idea 
of how narrow the streets are. Since a cat can jump across 
them without the least inconvenience, it is hardly necessary to 
state that such streets are too narrow for carriages. These 
vehicles can not navigate the Holy City. 

The population of Jerusalem is compose of Moslems, Jews, 
Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians, Greek 
Catholics, and a handful of Protestants. One hundred of the 
latter sect are all that dwell now in this birthplace of Chris- 
tianity. The nice shades of nationality comprised in the above 
list, and the languages spoken by them, are altogether too 
numerous to 
mention. It 
seems to me 
that all the 
races and 
colors and 
tongues of the 
earth must be 
represented 
among the 
fourteen thou- 
sand souls 
that dwell in 
Jerusalem. 
Rags, wretch- 
edness, pover- 
ty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence 
of Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, 
abound. Lepers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic, assail you 
on every hand, and they know but one word of but one lan- 
guage apparently — the eternal " bucksheesh." To see the 
numbers of maimed, malformed and diseased humanity that 




BEGGAES IX JERUSALEM. 



560 THE HOLY SEPULCH&E. 

throng the holy places and obstruct the gates, one might sup- 
pose that the ancient days had come again, and that the angel 
of the Lord was expected to descend at any moment to stir the 
waters of Bethesda. Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and 
lifeless. I would not desire to live here. 

One naturally goes first to the Holy Sepulchre. It is right 
in the city, near the western gate ; it and the place of the Cru- 
cifixion, and, in fact, every other place intimately connected 
with that tremendous event, are ingeniously massed together 
and covered by one roof — the dome of the Church of the Holy 
Sepulchre. 

Entering the building, through the midst of the usual assem- 
blage of beggars, one sees on his left a few Turkish guards — 
for Christians of different sects will not only quarrel, but fight, 
also, in this sacred place, if allowed to do it. Before you is a 
marble slab, which covers the Stone of Unction, whereon the 
Saviour's body was laid to prepare it for burial. It was found 
necessary to conceal the real stone in this way in order to save 
it from destruction. Pilgrims were too much given to chip- 
ping off pieces of it to carry home. Near by is a circular rail- 
ing which marks the spot where the Yirgin stood when the 
Lord's body was anointed. 

Entering the great Rotunda, we stand before the most sacred 
locality in Christendom — the grave of Jesus. It is in the 
centre of the church, and immediately under the great dome. 
It is inclosed in a sort of little temple of yellow and white 
stone, of fanciful design. Within the little temple is a portion 
of the very stone which was rolled away from the door of the 
Sepulchre, and on which the angel was sitting when Mary 
came thither " at early dawn." Stooping low, we enter the 
vault — the Sepulchre itself. It is only about six feet by seven, 
and the stone couch on which the dead Saviour lay extendi 
from end to end of the apartment and occupies half its width. 
It is covered with a marble slab which has been much worn by 
the lips of pilgrims. This slab serves &s an altar, now. Over 
it hang some fifty gold and silver lamps, which are kept always 
burning, and the place is otherwise scandalized by trumpery 
gewgaws and tawdry ornamentation. 



THE HOLY SEPULCHRE. 561 

All sects of Christians (except Protestants,) have chapels 
under the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and each 
must keep to itself and not venture upon another's ground. It 
has been proven conclusively that they can not worship together 
around the grave of the Saviour of the World in peace. The 
chapel of the Syrians is not handsome ; that of the Copts is 
the humblest of them all. It is nothing but a dismal cavern, 
roughly hewn in the living rock of the Hill of Calvary. In 
one side of it two ancient tombs are hewn, which are claimed 
to be those in which Kicodemus and Joseph of Aramathea 
were buried. 

As we moved among the great piers and pillars of another 
part of the church, we came upon a party of black-robed, 
animal-looking Italian monks, with candles in their hands, who 
were chanting something in Latin, and going through some 
kind of religious performance around a disk of white marble 
let into the floor. It was there that the risen Saviour appeared 
to Mary Magdalen in the likeness of a gardener. [Near by 
was a similar stone, shaped like a star — here the Magdalen 
herself stood, at the same time. Monks were performing in 
this place also. They perform every where — all over the vast 
building, and at all hours. Their candles are always flitting 
about in the gloom, and making the dim old church more dis- 
mal than there is any necessity that it should be, even though 
it is a tomb. 

We were shown the place where our Lord appeared to His 
mother after the Resurrection. Here, also, a marble slab marks 
the place where St. Helena, the mother of the Emperor Con- 
stantine, found the crosses about three hundred years after the 
Crucifixion. According to the legend, this great discovery 
elicited extravagant demonstrations of joy. But they were of 
short duration. The question intruded itself: "Which bore 
the blessed Saviour, and which the thieves ?" To be in doubt, 
in so mighty a matter as this — to be uncertain which one to 
adore — was a grievous misfortune. It turned the public joy 
to sorrow. But when lived there a holy priest who could not 
set so simple a trouble as this at rest ? One of these soon hit 

36 



562 THE LEGEND. 

upon a plan that would be a certain test. A noble lady lay 
very ill in Jerusalem. The wise priests ordered that the three 
crosses be taken to her bedside one at a time. It was done. 
When her eyes fell upon the first one, she uttered a scream 
that was heard beyond the Damascus Gate, and even upon the 
Mount of Olives, it was said, and then fell back in a deadly 
swoon. They recovered her and brought the second cross. 
Instantly she went into fearful convulsions, and it was with 
the greatest difficulty that six strong men could hold her. 
They were afraid, now, to bring in. the third cross. They be- 
gan to fear that possibly they had fallen upon the wrong 
crosses, and that the true cross was not with this number at 
all. However, as the woman seemed likely to die with the 
convulsions that were tearing her, they concluded that the third 
could do no more than put her out of her misery with a happy 
dispatch. So they brought it, and behold, a miracle ! The 
woman sprang from her bed, smiling and joyful, and perfectly 
restored to health. When we listen to evidence like this, we 
can not but believe. We would be ashamed to doubt, and 
properly, too. Even the very part of Jerusalem where this all 
occurred is there yet. So there i* really no room for doubt. 

The priests tried to show us, through a small screen, a frag- 
ment of the genuine Pillar of Flagellation, to which Christ 
was bound when they scourged him. But we could not see it, 
because it was dark inside the screen. However, a baton is 
kept here, which the pilgrim thrusts through a hole in the 
screen, and then he no longer doubts that the true Pillar of 
Flagellation is in there. He can not have any excuse to doubt 
it, for he can feel it with the stick. He can feel it as distinctly 
as he could feel any thing. 

Not far from here was a niche where they used to preserve 
a piece of the True Cross, but it is gone, now. This piece of 
the cross was discovered in the sixteenth century. The Latin 
priests say it was stolen away, long ago, by priests of another 
sect. That seems like a hard statement to make, but we know 
very well that it was stolen, because we have seen it ourselves 
in several of the cathedrals of Italy and France. 



GODFEEY'S SWORD. 563 

But the relic that touched us most was the plain old sword 
of that stout Crusader, Godfrey of Bulloigne — King Godfrey 
of Jerusalem. No blade in Christendom wields such enchant- 
ment as this — no blade of all that rust in the ancestral halls 
of Europe is able to invoke such visions of romance in the 
brain of him who looks upon it — none that can prate of such 
chivalric deeds or tell such brave tales of the warrior days of 
old. It stirs within a man every memory of the Holy Wars 
that has been sleeping in his brain for years, and peoples his 
thoughts with mail-clad images, with marching armies, with 
battles and with sieges. It speaks to him of Baldwin, and 
Tancred, the princely Saladin, and great Richard of the Lion 
Heart. It was with just such blades as these that these splen- 
did heroes of romance used to segregate a man, so to speak, 
and leave the half of him to fall one way and the other half 
the other. This very sword has cloven hundreds of Saracen 
Knights from crown to chin in those old times when Godfrey 
wielded it. It was enchanted, then, by a genius that was un- 
der the command of King Solomon. When danger approached 
its master's tent it always struck the shield and clanged out a 
fierce alarm upon the startled ear of night. In times of doubt, 
or in fog or darkness, if it were drawn from its sheath it 
would point instantly toward the foe, and thus reveal the way 
— and it would also attempt to start after them of its own ac- 
cord. A Christian could not be so disguised that it would not 
know him and refuse to hurt him — nor a Moslem so disguised 
that it would not leap from its scabbard and take his life. 
These statements are all well authenticated in many legends 
that are among the most trustworthy legends the good old 
Catholic monks preserve. I can never forget old Godfrey's 
sword, now. I tried it on a Moslem, and clove him in twain 
like a doughnut. The spirit of Grimes was upon me, and if 
I had had a graveyard I would have destroyed all the infidels 
in Jerusalem. I wiped the blood off the old sword and handed 
it back to the priest — I did not want the fresh gore to obliter- 
ate those sacred spots that crimsoned its brightness one day 
six hundred years ago and thus gave Godfrey warning that 
before the sun went down his journey of life would end. 



564: 



PRISON OF THE SAVIOUR. 



Still moving through the gloom of the Church of the Holy 
Sepulchre we came to a small chapel, hewn out of the rock — 




CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE. 



a place which has been known as " The Prison of Our Lord " 
for many centuries. Tradition says that here the Saviour was 



THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH. 565 

confined just previously to the crucifixion. Under an altar by 
the door was a pair of stone stocks for human legs. These 
things are called the " Bonds of Christ," and the use they were 
once put to has given them the name they now bear. 

The Greek Chapel is the most roomy, the richest and the 
showiest chapel in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Its 
altar, like that of all the Greek churches, is a lofty screen that 
extends clear across the chapel, and is gorgeous with gilding 
and pictures. The numerous lamps that hang before it are of 
gold and silver, and cost great sums. 

But the feature of the place is a short column that rises from 
the middle of the marble pavement of the chapel, and marks 
the exact centre of the earth. The most reliable traditions tell 
us that this was known to be the earth's centre, ages ago, and 
that when Christ was upon earth he set all doubts upon the 
subject at rest forever, by stating with his own lips that the 
tradition was correct. Bemember, He said that that particu- 
lar column stood upon the centre of the world. If the centre 
of the world changes, the column changes its position accord- 
ingly. This column has moved three different times, of its own 
accord. This is because, in great convulsions of nature, at 
three different times, masses of the earth — whole ranges of 
mountains, probably — have flown off into space, thus lessening 
the diameter of the earth, and changing the exact locality of 
its centre by a point or two. This is a very curious and inter- 
esting circumstance, and is a withering rebuke to those philos- 
ophers who would make us believe that it is not possible for 
any portion of the earth to fly off into space. 

To satisfy himself that this spot was really the centre of the 
earth, a sceptic once paid well for the privilege of ascending 
to the dome of the church to see if the sun gave him a shadow 
at noon. He came down perfectly convinced. The day was 
very cloudy and the sun threw no shadows at all ; but the man 
was satisfied that if the sun had come out and made shadows 
it could not have made any for him. Proofs like these are not 
to be set aside by the idle tongues of cavilers. To such as are 
not bigoted, and are willing to be convinced, they carry a con- 
viction that nothing can ever shake. 



566 



A LONG LOST RELATIVE. 



If even greater proofs than those I have mentioned are 
wanted, to satisfy the headstrong and the foolish that this is 
the genuine centre of the earth, they are here. The greatest 
of them lies in the fact that from under this very column was 
taken the dust from which Adam was made. This can surely 
be regarded in the light of a settler. It is not likely that the 
original first man would have been made from an inferior 
quality of earth when it was entirely convenient to get first 
quality from the world's centre. This will strike any reflect- 
ing mind forcibly. That Adam was formed of dirt procured 
in this very spot is amply proven by the fact that in six thou- 
sand years 
no man has 
ever been 
able to 
prove that 
the dirt was 
not procured 
here where- 
of he was 
made. 

It is a 
singular cir- 
cumstance 
that right 
under the 
roof of this 
same great 
church, and 
not far away 
from that 
i 1 1 u s trious 
column, 
Adam him- 
self, the fa- 

THE GRAVE OF ADAM. thei* 01 tlie 

human race, 
lies buried. There is no question that he is actually buried 




THE MARTYRED SOLDIER. 567 

in the grave which is pointed out as his — there can be none — 
because it has never yet been proven that that grave is not 
the grave in which he is buried. 

The tomb of Adam ! How touching it was, here in a land 
of strangers, far away from home, and friends, and all who 
cared for me, thus to discover the grave of a blood relation. 
True, a distant one, but still a relation. The unerring instinct 
of nature thrilled its recognition. The fountain of my filial 
affection was stirred to its profoundest depths, and I gave way 
to tumultuous emotion. I leaned upon a pillar and burst 
into tears. I deem it no shame to have wept over the grave 
of my poor dead relative. Let him who would sneer at my 
emotion close this volume here, for he will find little to his 
taste in my journeyings through Holy Land. Noble old man 
— he did not live to see me — he did not live to see his child. 
And I — I — alas, I did not live to see him. Weighed down by 
sorrow and disappointment, he died before I was born — six 
thousand brief summers before I was born. But let us try to 
bear it with fortitude. Let us trust that he is better off, where 
he is. Let us take comfort in the thought that his loss is our 
eternal gain. 

The next place the guide took us to in the holy church was 
an altar dedicated to the Roman soldier who was of the mili- 
tary guard that attended at the crucifixion to keep order, and 
who — when the vail of the Temple was rent in the awful dark- 
ness that followed ; when the rock of Golgotha was split asun- 
der by an earthquake ; when the artillery of heaven thundered, 
and in the baleful glare of the lightnings the shrouded dead 
flitted about th» streets of Jerusalem — shook with fear and 
said, " Surely this was the Son of God !" Where this altar 
stands now, that Roman soldier stood then, in full view of the 
crucified Saviour — in full sight and hearing of all the marvels 
that were transpiring far and wide about the circumference of 
the Hill of Calvary. And in this self-same spot the priests of 
the Temple beheaded him for those blasphemous words he had 
spoken. 

In this altar they used to keep one of the most curious relies 



568 THE INSCRIPTION. 

that human eyes ever looked upon — a thing that had power to 
fascinate the beholder in some mysterious way and keep him 
gazing for hours together. It was nothing less than the copper 
plate Pilate put upon the Saviour's cross, and upon which he 
wrote, " This is the King of the Jews." I think St. Helena, 
the mother of Constantine, found this wonderful memento 
when she was here in the third century. She traveled all over 
Palestine, and was always fortunate. Whenever the good old 
enthusiast found a thing mentioned in her Bible, Old or New, 
she would go and search for that thing, and never stop until 
she found it. If it was Adam, she Would find Adam ; if it was 
the Ark, she would find the Ark ; if it was Goliah, or Joshua, 
she would find them. She found the inscription here that I 
was speaking of, I think. She found it in this very spot, close 
to where the martyred Roman soldier stood. That copper 
plate is in one of the churches in Rome, now. Any one can 
see it there. The inscription is very distinct. ' 

We passed along a few steps and saw the altar built over 
the very spot where the good Catholic priests say the soldiers 
divided the raiment of the Saviour. 

Then we went down into a cavern which cavilers say was 
once a cistern. It is a chapel, now, however — the Chapel of 
St. Helena. It is fifty-one feet long by forty-three wide. In 
it is a marble chair which Helena used to sit in while she su- 
perintended her workmen when they were digging and delving 
for the True Cross. In this place is an altar dedicated to St. 
Dimas, the penitent thief. A new bronze statue is here — a 
statue of St. Helena. It reminded us of poor Maximilian, so 
lately shot. He presented it to this chapel when he was about 
to leave for his throne in Mexico. 

From the cistern we descended twelve steps into a large 
roughly-shaped grotto, carved wholly out of the living rock. 
Helena blasted it out when she was searching for the true 
cross. She had a laborious piece of work, here, but it was 
richly rewarded. Out of this place she got the crown of 
thorns, the nails of the cross, the true cross itself, and the cross 
of the penitent thief. When she thought she had found every 



CHAPEL OF THE MOCKING. 569 

thing and was about to stop, she was told in a dream to con- 
tinue a day longer. It was very fortunate. She did so, and 
found the cross of the other thief. 

The walls and roof of this grotto still weep bitter tears in 
memory of the event that transpired on Calvary, and devout 
pilgrims groan and sob when these sad tears fall upon them 
from the dripping rock. The monks call this apartment the 
" Chapel of the Invention of the Cross " — a name which is 
unfortunate, because it leads the ignorant to imagine that a 
tacit acknowledgment is thus made that the tradition that 
Helena found the true cross here is a fiction — an invention. 
It is a happiness to know, however, that intelligent people do 
not doubt the story in any of its particulars. 

Priests of any of the chapels and denominations in the 
Church of the Holy Sepulchre can visit this sacred grotto to 
weep and pray and worship the gentle Redeemer. Two differ- 
ent congregations are not allowed to enter at the same time, 
however, because they always fight. 

Still marching through the venerable Church of the Holy 
Sepulchre, among chanting priests in coarse long robes and 
sandals ; pilgrims of all colors and many nationalities, in all 
sorts of strange costumes ; under dusky arches and by dingy 
piers and columns ; through a sombre cathedral gloom freight- 
ed with smoke and incense, and faintly starred with scores of 
candles that appeared suddenly and as suddenly disappeared, 
or drifted mysteriously hither and thither about the distant 
aisles like ghostly jack o'-lanterns — we came at last to a small 
chapel which is called trie " Chapel of the Mocking." Under 
the altar was a fragmen of a marble column ; this was the 
seat Christ sat on when he was reviled, and mockingly made 
King, crowned with a crown of thorns and sceptred with a 
reed. It was here that they blindfolded him and struck him, 
and said in derision, " Prophesy who it is that smote thee." 
The tradition that this is the identical spot of the mocking is 
a very ancient one. The guide said that Saewulf was the first 
to mention it. I do not know Saevulf, but still, I can not 
well refuse to receive his evidence — none of us can. 



570 PLACE OF THE CRUCIFIXION. 

They showed us where the great Godfrey and his brother 
Baldwin, the first Christian Kings of Jerusalem, once lay bu- 
ried by that sacred sepulchre they had fought so long and so 
valiantly to wrest from the hands of the infidel. But the 
niches that had contained the ashes of these renowned crusa- 
ders were empty. Even the coverings of their tombs were 
gone — destroyed by devout members of the Greek Church, 
because Godfrey and Baldwin were Latin princes, and had 
been reared in a Christian faith whose creed differed in some 
unimportant respects from theirs. 

We passed on, and halted before the tomb of Melchisedek I 
You will remember Melchisedek, no doubt ; he was the King 
who came out and levied a tribute on Abraham the time that 
he pursued Lot's captors to Dan, and took all their property 
from them. That was about four thousand years ago, and 
Melchisedek died shortly afterward. However, his tomb is in 
a good state of preservation. 

When one enters the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the 
Sepulchre itself is the first thing he desires to see, and really 
is almost the first thing he does see. The next thing he has a 
strong yearning to see is the spot where the Saviour was cru- 
cified. But this they exhibit last. It is the crowning glory of 
the place. One is grave and thoughtful when he stands in the 
little Tomb of the Saviour — he could not well be otherwise in 
such a place — but he has not the slightest possible belief that 
ever the Lord lay there, and so the interest he feels in the spot 
is very, very greatly marred by that isflection. He looks at 
the place where Mary stood, in anoier part of the church, 
and where John stood, and Mary Magdalen ; where the mob 
derided the Lord ; where the angel sat ; where the crown of 
thorns was found, and the true cross ; where the risen Saviour 
appeared — he looks at all these places with interest, but with 
the same conviction he felt m the case of the Sepulchre, that 
there is nothing genuine about them, and that they are imag- 
inary holy places created oy the monks. But the place of the 
Crucifixion affects him differently. He fully believes that he 
is looking upon the very spot where the Saviour gave up his 



PLACE OF THE CRUCIFIXION. 571 

life. He remembers that Christ was very celebrated, long be- 
fore he came to Jerusalem ; he knows that his fame was so 
great that crowds followed him all the time ; he is aware that 
his entry into the city produced a stirring sensation, and that 
his reception was a kind of ovation ; he can not overlook the 
fact that when he was crucified there were very many in Jeru- 
salem who believed that he was the true Son of Grod. To pub- 
licly execute such a personage was sufficient in itself to make 
the locality of the execution a memorable place for ages ; add- 
ed to this, the storm, the darkness, the earthquake, the rending 
of the vail of the Temple, and the untimely waking of the 
dead, were events calculated to fix the execution and the scene 
of it in the memory of even the most thoughtless witness. 
Fathers would tell their sons about the strange affair, and 
point out the spot ; the sons would transmit the story to their 
children, and thus a period of three hundred years would ea- 
sily be spanned* — at which time Helena came and built a 
church upon Calvary to commemorate the death and burial of 
the Lord and preserve the sacred place in the memories of 
men ; since that time there has always been a church there. 
It is not possible that there can be any mistake about the local- 
ity of the Crucifixion. Not half a dozen persons knew where 
they buried the Saviour, perhaps, and a burial is not a start- 
ling event, any how ; therefore, we can be pardoned for unbe- 
lief in the Sepulchre, but not in the place of the Crucifixion. 
Five hundred years hence there will be no vestige of Bunker 
Hill Monument left, but America will still know where the 
battle was fought and where Warren fell. The crucifixion of 
Christ was too notable an event in Jerusalem, and the Hill of 
Calvary made too celebrated by it, to be forgotten in the short 
space of three hundred years. I climbed the stairway in the 
church which brings one to the top of the small inclosed pin- 
nacle of rock, and looked upon the place where the true cross 
once stood, with a far more absorbing interest than I had ever 
felt in any thing earthly before. I could not believe that the 

* The thought is Mr. Prime's, not mine, and is full of good sense. I borrowed it 
from his " Tent Life."— M. T. 



572 PLACE OF THE CRUCIFIXION. 

three holes in the top of the rock were the actual ones the 
crosses stood in, but I felt satisfied that those crosses had stood 
so near the place now occupied by them, that the few feet of 
possible difference were a matter of no consequence. 

When one stands where the Saviour was crucified, he finds 
it all he can do to keep it strictly before his mind that Christ 
was not crucified in a Catholic Church. He must remind him- 
self every now and then that the great event transpired in the 
open air, and not in a gloomy, candle-lighted cell in a little 
corner of a vast church, up-stairs, — a small cell all bejeweled 
and bespangled with flashy ornamentation, in execrable taste. 

Under a marble altar like a table, is a circular hole in the 
marble floor, corresponding with the one just under it in which 
the true cross stood. The first thing every one does is to kneel 
down and take a candle and examine this hole. He does this 
strange prospecting with an amount of gravity that can never 
be estimated or appreciated by a man who has not seen the op- 
eration. Then he holds his candle before a richly engraved pic- 
ture of the Saviour, done on a massy slab of gold, and wonder- 
fully rayed and starred with diamonds, which hangs above the 
hole within the altar, and his solemnity changes to lively admi- 
ration. He rises and faces the finely wrought figures of the Sav- 
iour and the malefactors uplifted upon their crosses behind the 
altar, and bright with a metallic lustre of many colors. He turns 
next to the figures close to them of the Virgin and Mary Mag- 
dalen ; next to the rift in the living rock made by the earth- 
quake at the time of the Crucifixion, and an extension of which 
he had seen before in the wall of one of the grottoes below ; 
he looks next at the show-case with a figure of the Virgin in it, 
and is amazed at the princely fortune in precious gems and 
jewelry that hangs so thickly about the form as to hide it like 
a garment almost. All about the apartment the gaudy trap- 
pings of the Greek Church offend the eye and keep the mind 
on the rack to remember that this is the Place of the Cruci- 
fixion — Golgotha — the Mount of Calvary. And the last thing 
he looks at is that which was also the first — the place where 
the true cross stood. That will chain him to the spot and 



PLACE OF THE CRUCIFIXION. 573 

compel him to look once more, and once again, after he has 
satisfied all curiosity and lost all interest concerning the other 
matters pertaining to the locality. 

And so I close my chapter on the Church of the Holy Sep- 
ulchre — the most sacred locality on earth to millions and mil- 
lions of men, and women, and children, the noble and the 
humble, bond and free. In its history from the first, and in its 
tremendous associations, it is the most illustrious edifice in 
Christendom. With all its clap-trap side-shows and unseemly 
impostures of every kind, it is still grand, reverend, venerable 
— for a god died there ; for fifteen hundred years its shrines 
have been wet with the tears of pilgrims from the earth's re- 
motest confines ; for more than two hundred, the most gallant 
knights that ever wielded sword wasted their lives away in a 
struggle to seize it and hold it sacred from infidel pollution. 
Even in our own day a war, that cost millions of treasure and 
rivers of blood, was fought because two rival nations claimed 
the sole right to put a new dome upon it. History is full of 
this old Church of the Holy Sepulchre — full of blood that was 
shed because of the respect and the veneration in which men 
held the last resting-place of the meek and lowly, the mild and 
gentle, Prince of Peace ! 



OHAPTEE LIV. 



~TT7~E were standing in a narrow street, by the Tower of 
▼ ▼ Antonio. " On these stones that are crumbling away," 
the guide said> M the Saviour sat and rested before taking up the 
cross. This is the beginning of the Sorrowful Way, or the Way 
of Grief." The party took note of the sacred spot, and moved 
on. We passed under the " Ecce Homo Arch," and saw the 
very window from which Pilate's wife warned her husband te 
have nothing to do with the persecution of the Just Man. 
This window is in an excellent state of preservation, consider- 
ing its great age. They showed us where Jesus rested the 
second time, and where the mob refused to give him up, and 
said, " Let his blood be upon our heads, and upon our children's 
children forever." The French Catholics are building a church 
on this spot, and with their usual veneration for historical 
relics, are incorporating into the new such scraps of ancient 
walls as they have found there. Further on, we saw the spcv 
where the fainting Saviour fell under the weight of his cro^ , 
A great granite column of some ancient temple lay there at 
the time, and the heavy cross struck it such a blow that it 
broke in two in the middle. Such was the guide's story when 
he halted us before the broken column. 

We crossed a street, and came presently to the former resi- 
dence of St. Yeronica. When the Saviour passed there, she 
came out, full of womanly compassion, and spoke pitying words 
to him, undaunted by the hootings and the threatenings of the 
mob, and wiped the perspiration from his face with her hand- 
kerchief. We had heard so much of St. Yeronica, and seen 



THE SORROWFUL WAY. 575 

her picture by so many masters, that it was like meeting an 
old friend unexpectedly to come upon her ancient home in Je- 
rusalem. The strangest thing about the incident that has 
made her name so famous, is, that when she wiped the perspi- 
ration away, the print of the Saviour's face remained upon the 
handkerchief, a perfect portrait, and so remains unto this day. 
We knew this, because we saw this handkerchief in a cathe- 
dral in Paris, in another in Spain, and in two others in Italy. 
In the Milan cathedral it costs five francs to see it, and at St. 
Peter's, at Pome, it is almost impossible to see it at any price. 
No tradition is so amply verified as this of St. Yeronica and 
her handkerchief. 

At the next corner we saw a deep indention in the hard stone 
masonry of the corner of a house, but might have gone heed- 
lessly by it but that the guide said it was made by the elbow 
of the Saviour, who stumbled here and fell. Presently we 
came to just such another indention in a stone wall. The guide 
said the Saviour fell here, also, and made this depression with 
his elbow. 

There were other places where the Lord fell, and others 
where he rested ; but one of the most curious landmarks of 
ancient history we found on this morning walk through the 
crooked lanes that lead toward Calvary, was a certain stone 
built into a house — a stone that was so seamed and scarred 
that it bore a sort of grotesque resemblance to the human face. 
The projections that answered for cheeks were worn smooth by 
the passionate kisses of generations of pilgrims from distant 
lands. We asked " Why ?" The guide said it was because 
this was one of " the very stones of Jerusalem " that Christ 
mentioned when he was reproved for permitting the people to 
cry " Hosannah !" when he made his memorable entry into the 
city upon an ass. One of the pilgrims said, " But there is no 
evidence that the stones did cry out — Christ said that if the 
people stopped from shouting Hosannah, the very stones would 
do it." The guide was perfectly serene. He said, calmly, 
" This is one of the stones that would have cried out." It was 
of little use to try to shake this fellow's simple faith — it was 
easy to see that. 



6 THE WANDERING JEW. 

And so we came at last to another wonder, of deep and 
abiding interest — the veritable house where the unhappy 
wretch once lived who has been celebrated in song and story 
for more than eighteen hundred years as the Wandering Jew. 
On the memorable day of the Crucifixion he stood in this old 
doorway with his arms akimbo, looking out upon the strug- 
gling mob that was approaching, and when the weary Saviour 
would have sat down and rested him a moment, pushed him 
rudely away and said, " Move on !" The Lord said, " Move 
on, thou, likewise," and the command has never been revoked 
from that day to this. All men know how that the miscreant 
upon whose head that just curse fell has roamed up and down 
the wide world, for ages and ages, seeking rest and never find- 
ing it — courting death but always in vain — longing to stop, in 
city, in wilderness, in desert solitudes, yet hearing always that 
relentless warning to march — march on ! They say — do these 
hoary traditions— that when Titus sacked Jerusalem and 
slaughtered eleven hundred thousand Jews in her streets and 
by-ways, the Wandering Jew was seen always in the thickest 
of the fight, and that when battle-axes gleamed in the air, he 
bowed his head beneath them ; when swords flashed their 
deadly lightnings, he sprang in their way ; he bared his breast 
to whizzing javelins, to hissing arrows, to any and to every 
weapon that promised death and forgetfulness, and rest. But 
it was useless — he walked forth out of the carnage without a 
wound. And it is said that five hundred years afterward he 
followed Mahomet when he carried destruction to the cities of 
Arabia, and then turned against him, hoping in this way to 
win the death of a traitor. His calculations were wrong 
again. No quarter was given to any living creature but one, 
and that was the only one of all the host that did not want it. 
He sought death five hundred years later, in the wars of the 
Crusades, and offered himself to famine and pestilence at As- 
calon. He escaped again — he could not die. These repeated 
anno}^ances could have at last but one effect — they shook his 
confidence. Since then the Wandering Jew has carried on a 
kind of desultory toying with the most promising of the aids 



THE WANDERING JEW. 



577 



and implements of destruction, bnt with small hope, as a gen- 
eral thing. He has speculated some in cholera and railroads, 
and has taken almost a lively interest in infernal machines and 
patent medicines. He is old, now, and grave, as becomes an 
age like his ; he indulges in no light amusements save that he 
goes sometimes to executions, and is fond of funerals. 

There is one thing he can not avoid ; go where he will about 
the world, he must never fail to report in Jerusalem every fif- 
tieth year. Only a year or two ago he was here for the thirty- 
seventh time since Jesus was crucified on Calvary. They say 
that many old people, who are here now, saw him then, and 




THE WAXDERIXG JEW. 



had seen him before. He looks always the same — old, and 
withered, and hollow-eyed, and listless, save that there is about 
him something which seems to suggest that he is looking for some 
one, expecting some one — the friends of his youth, perhaps. 
But the most of them are dead, now. He always pokes about the 



578 THE WANDERING JEW. 

old streets looking lonesome, making his mark on a wall here 
and there, and eyeing the oldest buildings with a sort of friendly 
half interest ; and he sheds a few tears at the threshold of his 
ancient dwelling, and bitter, bitter tears they are. Then he col- 
lects his rent and leaves again. He has been seen standing near 
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on many a starlight night, 
for he has cherished an idea for many centuries that if he could 
only enter there, he could rest. But when he approaches, the 
doors slam to with a crash, the earth trembles, and all the lights 
in Jerusalem burn a ghastly blue !, He does this every fifty 
years, just the same. It is hopeless, but then it is hard to break 
habits One has been eighteen hundred years accustomed to. 
The old tourist is far away on his wanderings, now. How he 
must smile to see a pack of blockheads like us, galloping about 
the world, and looking wise, and imagining we are finding 
out a good deal about it ! He must have a consuming con- 
tempt for the ignorant, complacent asses that go skurrying 
about the world in these railroading days and call it traveling. 
When the guide pointed out where the Wandering Jew had 
left his familiar mark upon a wall, I was filled with astonish- 
ment. It read : 

"S. T.— 1860— X." 

All I have revealed about the Wandering Jew can be amply 
proven by reference to our guide. 

The mighty Mosque of Omar, and the paved court around 
it, occupy a fourth part of Jerusalem. They are upon Mount 
Moriah, where King Solomon's Temple stood. This Mosque is 
the holiest place the Mohammedan knows, outside of Mecca. 
Up to within a year or two past, no Christian could gain ad- 
mission to it or its court for love or money. But the prohibi- 
tion has been removed, and we entered freely for bucksheesh. 

I need not speak of the wonderful beauty and the exquisite 
grace and symmetry that have made this Mosque so celebrated 
— because I did not see them. One can not see such things at 
an instant glance — one frequently only finds out how really 
beautiful a really beautiful woman is after considerable ac 



rock. 579 

quamtance with her ; and the rule applies to Niagara Falls, to 
majestic mountains and to mosques — especially to mosques. 

The ^reat feature of the Mosque of Omar is the prodigious 
rock in the centre of its rotunda. It was upon this rock that 
Abraham came so near offering up his son Isaac — this, at 
least, is authentic — it is very much more to be relied on than 
most of the traditions, at any rate. On this rock, also, the 
angel stood and threatened Jerusalem, and David persuaded 
him to spare the city. Mahomet was well acquainted with 
this stone. From it he ascended to heaven. The stone tried 
to follow him, and if the angel Gabriel had not happened by 
the merest good luck to be there to seize it, it would have done 
it. Yery few people have a grip like Gabriel — the prints of 
his monstrous fingers, two inches deep, are to be seen in that 
rock to-day. 

This rock, large as it is, is suspended in the air. It does not 
touch any thing at all. The guide said so. This is very won- 
derful. In the place on it where Mahomet stood, he left his 
foot-prints in the solid stone. I should judge that he wore 
about eighteens. But what I was going to say, when I spoke 
of the rock being suspended, was, that in the floor of the cav- 
ern under it they showed us a slab which they said covered a 
hole which was a thing of extraordinary interest to all Mo- 
hammedans, because that hole leads down to perdition, and 
every soul that is transferred from thence to Heaven must 
pass up through this orifice. Mahomet stands there and lifts 
them out by the hair. All Mohammedans shave their heads, 
but they are careful to leave a lock of hair for the Prophet to 
take hold of. Our guide observed that a good Mohammedan 
would consider himself doomed to stay with the damned for- 
ever if he were to lose his scalp-lock and die before it grew 
again. The most of them that I have seen ought to stay with 
the damned, any how, without reference to how they were 
barbered. 

For several ages no woman has been allowed to enter the 
cavern where that important hole is. The reason is that one 
of the sex was once caught there blabbing every thing she 



580 THE GREAT MOSQUE. 

knew about what was going on above ground, to the rapscal- 
lions in the infernal regions down below. She carried her gos- 
siping to such an extreme that nothing could be kept private 
— nothing could be done or said on earth but every body in 
perdition knew all about it before the sun went down. It 
was about time to suppress this woman's telegraph, and it was 
promptly done. Her breath subsided about the same time. 

The inside of the great mosque is very showy with variega- 
ted marble walls and with windows and inscriptions of elabo- 
rate mosaic. The Turks have their sacred relics, like the 
Catholics. The guide showed us the veritable armor worn by 
the great son-in-law and successor of Mahomet, and also the 
buckler of Mahomet's uncle. The great iron railing which 
surrounds the rock was ornamented in one place with a thou- 
sand rags tied to its open work. These are to remind Maho- 
met not to forget the worshipers who placed them there. 
It is considered the next best thing tc tying threads around hi*< 
finger by way of reminders. 

Just outside the mosque is a miniature temple, which marks 
the spot where David and Goliah used to sit and judge the 
people.* 

Every where about the Mosque of Omar are portions of pil- 
lars, curiously wrought altars, and fragments of elegantly 
carved marble — precious remains of Solomon's Temple. These 
have been dug from all depths in the soil and rubbish of 
Mount Moriah, and the Moslems have always shown a disposi- 
tion to preserve them with the utmost care. At that portion 
of the ancient wall of Solomon's Temple which is called the 
Jew's Place of Wailing, and where the Hebrews assemble 
every Friday to kiss the venerated stones and weep over the 
fallen greatness of Zion, any one can see a part of the unques- 
tioned and undisputed Temple of Solomon, the same consisting 
of three or four stones lying one upon the other, each of which 
is about twice as long as a seven-octave piano, and about as thick 
as such a piano is high. But, as I have remarked before, it is 

* A pilgrim informs me that it was not David and Goliah, but David and Saul. I 
stick to my own statement — the guide told me, and he ought to know. 



FRAGMENTS OF THE TEMPLE 



581 



only a year or two ago that the ancient edict prohibiting 
Christian rubbish like ourselves to enter the Mosque of Omar 
and see the costly marbles that once adorned the inner Temple 
was annulled. The designs wrought upon these fragments are 
all quaint and peculiar, and so the charm of novelty is added 
to the deep interest they naturally inspire. One meets with 
these venerable scraps at every turn, especially in the neighbor- 
ing Mosque el Aksa, into whose inner walls a very large num- 
ber of them are carefully built for preservation. These pieces 
of stone, stained and dusty with age, dimly hint at a grandeur 
we have all been taught to regard as the princeliest ever seen 
on earth ; and they call up pictures of a pageant that is familiar 




MOSQUE OF O-MAR. 

to all imaginations — camels laden with spices and treasure — 
beautiful slaves, presents for Solomon's harem — a long cavalcade 
of richly caparisoned beasts and warriors — and Sheba's Queen in 
the van of this vision of " Oriental magnificence." These ele- 
gant fragments bear a richer interest than the solemn vastness 
of the stones the Jews kiss in the Place of Wailing can ever 
have for the heedless sinner. 

Down in the hollow ground, underneath the olives and the 



582 SURFEITED WITH SIGHTS. 

orange-trees that flourish in the court of the great Mosque, is 
a wilderness of pillars — remains of the ancient Temple ; they 
supported it. There are ponderous archways down there, 
also, over which the destroying " plough " of prophecy passed 
harmless. It is pleasant to know we are disappointed, in that 
we never dreamed we might see portions of the actual Temple 
of Solomon, and yet experience no shadow of suspicion that 
they were a monkish humbug and a fraud. 

We are surfeited with sights. Nothing has any fascination for 
us, now, but the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. We have been, 
there every day, and have not grown tired of it ; but we are 
weary of every thing else. The sights are too many. They 
swarm about you at every step ; no single foot of ground in all 
Jerusalem or within its neighborhood seems to be without a 
stirring and important history of its own. It is a very relief 
to steal a walk of a hundred yards without a guide along to 
talk unceasingly about every stone you step upon and drag you 
back ages and ages to the day when it achieved celebrity. 

It seems hardly real when I find myself leaning for a 
moment on a ruined wall and looking listlessly down into the 
historic pool of Bethesda. I did not think such things could 
be so crowded together as to diminish their interest. But in 
serious truth, we have been drifting about, for several days, 
using our eyes and our ears more from a serfse of duty than 
any higher and worthier reason. And too often we have been 
glad when it was time to go home and be distressed no more 
about illustrious localities. 

Our pilgrims compress too much into one day. One can 
gorge sights to repletion as well as sweetmeats. Since we 
breakfasted, this morning, we have seen enough to have fur- 
nished us food for a year's reflection if we could have seen 
the various objects in comfort and looked upon them deliber- 
ately. We visited the pool of Hezekiah, where David saw 
Uriah's wife coming from the bath and fell in love with her. 

We went out of the city by the Jaffa gate, and of course 
were told many things about its Tower of Hippicus. 

We rode across the Valley of Hinnom, between two of the 



SURFEITED WITH SIGHTS. 583 

Pools of Gihon, and by an aqueduct built bj Solomon, which 
still conveys water to the city. We ascended the Hill of Evil 
Counsel, where Judas received his thirty pieces of silver, and 
we also lingered a moment under the tree a venerable tradition 
says he hanged himself on. 

We descended to the canon again, and then the guide began 
to give name and history to every bank and boulder we came 
to : " This was the Field of Blood ; these cuttings in 
the rocks were shrines and temples of Moloch ; here they sac- 
rificed children ; yonder is the Zion Gate ; the Tyropean Val- 
ley ; the Hill of Ophel ; here is the junction of the Valley of 
Jehoshaphat — on your right is the Well of Job." We turned 
up Jehoshaphat. The recital went on. " This is the Mount 
of Olives ; this is the Hill of Offense ; the nest of huts is the 
Tillage of Siloam ; here, yonder, every where, is the King's 
Garden ; under this great tree Zacharias, the high priest, was 
murdered ; yonder is Mount Moriah and the Temple wall ; the 
tomb of Absalom ; the tomb of St. James ; the tomb of Zach- 
arias ; beyond, are the Garden of Gethsemane and the tomb of 
the Virgin Mary ; here is the Pool of Siloam, and — " 

We said we would dismount, and quench our thirst, and 
rest. We were burning up with the heat. We were failing 
under the accumulated fatigue of days and days of ceaseless 
marching. All were willing. 

The Pool is a deep, walled ditch, through which a clear 
stream of water runs, that comes from under Jerusalem some- 
where, and passing through the Fountain of the Virgin, or 
being supplied from it, reaches this place by way of a tunnel 
of heavy masonry. The famous pool looked exactly as it 
looked in Solomon's time, no doubt, and the same dusky, Ori>. 
ental women, came down in their old Oriental way, and car- 
ried off jars of the water on their heads, just as they did three 
thousand years ago, and just as they will do fifty thousand 
years hence if any of them are still left on earth. 

We went away from there and stopped at the Fountain of 
the Virgin. But the water was not good, and there was na 
comfort or peace any where, on account of the regiment of boys 



584 THE GOLDEN GATE. 

and girls and beggars that persecuted us all the time for buck- 
sheesh. The guide wanted us to give them some money, and 
we did it ; but when he went on to say that they were starving 
to death we could not but feel that we had done a great sin in 
throwing obstacles in the way of such a desirable consumma- 
tion, and so we tried to collect it back, but it could not be 
done. 

We entered the Garden of Gethsemane, and we visited the 
Tomb of the Virgin, both of which we had seen before. It is 
not meet that I should speak of them now. A more fitting 
time will come. 

I can not speak now of the Mount of Olives or its view of 
Jerusalem, the Dead Sea and the mountains of Moab ; nor of 
the Damascus Gate or the tree that was planted by King God- 
frey of Jerusalem. One ought to feel pleasantly when he talk? 
of these things. I can not say any thing about the stone col- 
umn that projects over Jehoshaphat from the Temple wall like 
a cannon, except that the Moslems believe Mahomet will sit 
astride of it when he comes to judge the world. It is a pity 
he could not judge it from some roost of his own in Mecca, 
without trespassing on our holy ground. Close by is the Golden 
Gate, in the Temple wall — a gate that was an elegant piece of 
sculpture in the time of the Temple, and is even so yet. From 
it, in ancient times, the Jewish High Priest turned loose the 
scapegoat and let him flee to the wilderness and bear away his 
twelve-month load of the sins of the people. If they were to 
turn one loose now, he would not get as far as the Garden of 
Gethsemane, till these miserable vagabonds here would gobble 
him up,* sins and all. They wouldn't care. Mutton-chops and 
sin is good enough living for them. The Moslems watch the 
Golden Gate with a jealous eye, and an anxious one, for they 
have an honored tradition that when it falls, Islamism will fall, 
and with it the Ottoman Empire. It did not grieve me any to 
notice that the old gate was getting a little shaky. 

We are at home again. We are exhausted. The sun has 
roasted us, almost. 

* Favorite pilgrim expression. 



COMFORTS. 585 

We have full comfort in one reflection, however. Our expe- 
riences in Europe have taught us that in time this fatigue will 
be forgotten ; the heat will be forgotten ; the thirst, the tire- 
some volubility of the guide, the persecutions of the beggars 
— and then, all that will be left will be pleasant memories of 
Jerusalem, memories we shall call up with always increasing 
interest as the years go by, memories which some day will be- 
come all beautiful when the last annoyance that incumbers 
them shall have faded out of our minds never again to return. 
School-boy days are no happier than the days of after life, but 
we look back upon them regretfully because we have forgotten 
our punishments at school, and how we grieved when our mar- 
bles were lost and our kites destroyed — because we have for- 
gotten all the sorrows and privations of that canonized epoch 
and remember only its orchard robberies, its wooden sword pa- 
geants and its fishing holydays. We are satisfied. We can 
wait. Our reward will come. To us, Jerusalem and to-day's 
experiences will be an enchanted memory a year hence — a 
memory which money could not buy from us. 



OHAPTEE LT. 

"VT7"E cast up the account. It footed up pretty fairly. 

▼ ▼ There was nothing more at Jerusalem to be seen, ex- 
cept the traditional houses of Dives and Lazarus of the para- 
ble, the Tombs of the Kings, and those of the Judges ; the 
spot where they stoned one of the disciples to death, and be- 
headed another ; the room and the table made celebrated by 
the Last Supper ; the fig-tree that Jesus withered ; a number 
of historical places about Gethsemane and the Mount of Olives, 
and fifteen or twenty others in different portions of the city 
itself. 

We were approaching the end. Human nature asserted it- 
self, now. Overwork and consequent exhaustion began to 
have their natural effect. They began to master the energies 
and dull the ardor of the party. Perfectly secure now, against 
failing to accomplish any detail of the pilgrimage, they felt 
like drawing in advance upon the holyday soon to be placed to 
their credit. They grew a little lazy. They were late to 
breakfast and sat long at dinner. Thirty or forty pilgrims had 
arrived from the ship, by the short routes, and much swapping 
of gossip had to be indulged in. And in hot afternoons, they 
showed a strong disposition to lie on the cool divans in tho 
hotel and smoke and talk about pleasant experiences of a 
month or so gone by — for even thus early do episodes of travel 
which were sometimes annoying, sometimes exasperating and 
full as often of no consequence at all when they transpired, 
begin to rise above the dead level of monotonous reminiscences 
and become shapely landmarks in one's memory. The fog- 



CHARMS OF NOMADIC LIFE. 587 

whistle, smothered among a million of trifling sounds, is not no- 
ticed a block away, in the city, but the sailor hears it far at sea, 
whither none of those thousands of trifling sounds can reach. 
When one is in Home, all the domes are alike ; but when he has 
gone away twelve miles, the city fades utterly from sight and 
leaves St. Peter's swelling above the level plain like an an- 
chored balloon. When one is traveling in Europe, the daily 
incidents seem all alike ; but when he has placed them all two 
months and two thousand miles behind hiro, those that were 
worthy of being remembered are prominent, and those that 
were really insignificant have vanished. This disposition to 
smoke, and idle and talk, was not well. It was plain that it 
must not be allowed to gain ground. A diversion must be 
tried, or demoralization would ensue. The Jordan, Jericho 
and the Dead Sea were suggested. The remainder of Jeru- 
salem must be left un visited, for a little while. The journey 
was approved at once. New life stirred in every pulse. In 
the saddle — abroad on the plains — sleeping in beds bounded 
only by the horizon : fancy was at work with these things in a. 
moment. — It was painful to note how readily these town-bred 
men had taken to the free life of the camp and the desert 
The nomadic instinct is a human instinct ; it was born with 
Adam and transmitted through the patriarchs, and after thirty 
eenturies of steady effort, civilization has not educated it en- 
tirely out of us yet. It has a charm which, once tasted, a man 
will yearn to taste again. The nomadic instinct can not be 
educated out of an Indian at all. 

The Jordan journey being approved, our dragoman was no- 
tified. 

At nine in the morning the caravan was before the hotel 
door and we were at breakfast. There was a commotion about 
the place. Rumors of war and bloodshed were flying every 
where. The lawless Bedouins in the Yalley of the Jordan and 
the deserts down by the Dead Sea were up in arms, and were 
going to destroy all comers. They had had a battle with a 
troop of Turkish cavalry and defeated them ; several men 
killed. They had shut up the inhabitants of a village and a 



588 DISMAL RUMORS. 

Turkish garrison in an old fort near Jericho, and were be- 
sieging them. They had marched upon a camp of our excur- 
sionists by the Jordan, and the pilgrims only saved their lives 
by stealing away and flying to Jerusalem under whip and spur 
in the darkness of the night. Another of our parties had been 
fired on from an ambush and then attacked in the open day. 
Shots were fired on both sides. Fortunately there was no 
bloodshed. We spoke with the very pilgrim who had fired 
one of the shots, and learned from his own lips how, in this 
imminent deadly peril, only the cool courage of the pilgrims, 
their strength of numbers and imposing display of war mate- 
rial, had saved them from utter destruction. It was reported 
that the Consul had requested that no more of our pilgrims 
should go to the Jordan while this state of things lasted ; and 
further, that he was unwilling tnat any more should go, at least 
without an unusually strong military guard. Here was 
trouble. But with the horses at the door and every body 
aware of what they were there for, what would you have done ? 
Acknowledged that you were afraid, and backed shamefully 
out ? Hardly. It would not be human nature, where there 
were so many women. You would have done as we did : said 
you were not afraid of a million Bedouins — and made your 
will and proposed quietly to yourself to take up an unostenta- 
tious position in the rear of the procession. 

I think we must all have determined upon the same line of 
tactics, for it did seem as if we never would get to Jericho. I 
had a notoriously slow horse, but somehow I could not keep 
him in the rear, to save my neck. He was forever turning up 
in the lead. In such cases I trembled a little, and got down 
to fix my saddle. But it was not of any use. The others all 
got down to fix their saddles, too. I never saw such a time 
with saddles. It was the first time any of them had got out 
of order in three weeks, and now they had all broken down at 
once. I tried walking, for exercise — I had not had enough in 
Jerusalem searching for holy places. But it was a failure. 
The whole mob were suffering for exercise, and it was not fifteen 



LAZARUS. 



589 



minutes till they were all on foot and I had the lead again. It 
was very discouraging. 




AN EPIDEMIC. 



This was all after we got beyond Bethany. We stopped at 
the village of Bethany, an hour out from Jerusalem. They 
showed us the tomb of Lazarus. I had rather live in it than 
in any house in the town. And they showed us also a large 
" Fountain of Lazarus," and in the centre of the village the 
ancient dwelling of Lazarus. Lazarus appears to have been a 
man of property. The legends of the Sunday Schools do him 
great injustice ; they give one the impression that he was poor. 
It is because they get him confused with that Lazarus who had 
no merit but his virtue, and virtue never has been as respect- 
able as money. The house of Lazarus is a three-story edifice, 
of stone masonry, but the accumulated rubbish of ages has 
buried all of it but the upper story. We took candles and de- 
scended to the dismal cell-like chambers where Jesus sat at 
meat with Martha and Mary, and conversed with them about 
their brother. We could not but look upon these old dingy 
apartments with a more than common interest. 



590 



BEDOUINS. 



We had had a glimpse, from a mountain top, of the Dead 
Sea, lying like a blue shield in the plain of the Jordan, ana 
now we were marching down a close, flaming, rugged, desolate 
defile, where no living creature could enjoy life, except, per- 
haps, a salamander. It was such a dreary, repulsive, horrible 
solitude ! It was the " wilderness " where John preached, 
with camel's hair about his loins — raiment enough — but he 
never could have got his locusts and wild honey here. We 
were moping along down through this dreadful place, every 
man in the rear. Our guards — two gorgeous young Arab 
sheiks, with cargoes of swords, guns, pistols and daggers on. 
board — were loafing ahead. 
" Bedouins !" 

Every man shrunk up and disappeared in his clothes like a 

mud-turtle. My 
first impulse was 
to dash forward 
and destroy the 
Bedouins. My 
second was to 
dash to the rear 
to see if there 
were any coming 
in that direction. 
I acted on the 
latter impulse. 
So did all the 
others. If any 
Bedouins had 
approached us, 
then, from that 
point of the 
compass, they 
would have paid 
dearly for their 
rashness. We 
all remarked 
that, afterwards. There would have been scenes of riot and 




CHARGE OM BEDOUINS. 



BEDOUINS. 591 

bloodshed there that no pen could describe. I know that, be- 
cause each man told what he would have done, individually ; 
and such a medley of strange and unheard-of inventions of 
cruelty you could not conceive of. One man said he had 
calmly made up his mind to perish where he stood, if need be, 
but never yield an inch ; he was going to wait, with deadly 
patience, till he could count the stripes upon the first Be- 
douin's jacket, and then count them and let him have it. An- 
other was going to sit still till the first lance reached within an 
inch of his breast, and then dodge it and seize it. I forbear 
to tell what he was going to do to that Bedouin that owned it. 
It makes my blood run cold to think of it. Another was 
going to scalp such Bedouins as fell to his share, and take his 
bald-headed sons of the desert home with him alive for 
trophies. But the wild-eyed pilgrim rhapsodist was silent. 
His orbs gleamed with a deadly light, but his lips moved not. 
Anxiety grew, and he was questioned. If he had got a Be- 
douin, what would he have done with him — shot him ? He 
smiled a smile of grim contempt and shook his head. "Would 
he have stabbed him ? Another shake. Would he have quar- 
tered him — fiayed him? More shakes. Oh! horror, what 
would he have done ? 

" Eat him !" 

Such was the awful sentence that thundered from his lips. 
What was grammar to a desperado like that ? I was glad in 
my heart that I had been spared these scenes of malignant 
carnage. No Bedouins attacked our terrible rear. And none 
attacked the front. The new-comers were only a reinforce- 
ment of cadaverous Arabs, in shirts and bare legs, sent far 
ahead of us to brandish rusty guns, and shout and brag, and 
carry on like lunatics, and thus scare away all bands of ma- 
rauding Bedouins that might lurk about our path. What a 
shame it is that armed white Christians must travel under 
guard of vermin like this as a protection against the prowling 
vagabonds of the desert — those sanguinary outlaws who are 
always going to do something desperate, but never do it. I 
may as well mention here that on our whole trip we saw no 



592 THE NIGHT MARCH. 

Bedouins, and had no more use for an Arab guard than we 
could have had for patent leather boots and white kid gloves. 
The Bedouins that attacked the other parties of pilgrims so 
fiercely were provided for the occasion by the Arab guards of 
those parties, and shipped from Jerusalem for temporary ser- 
vice as Bedouins. They met together in full view of the pil- 
grims, after the battle, and took lunch, divided the bucksheesh 
extorted in the season of danger, and then accompanied the 
cavalcade home to the city ! The nuisance of an Arab guard 
is one which is created by the Sheiks and the Bedouins to- 
gether, for mutual profit, it is said, and no doubt there is a 
good deal of truth in it. 

We visited the fountain the prophet Elisha sweetened (it is 
sweet yet ;) where he remained some time and was fed by the 
ravens. 

Ancient Jericho is not very picturesque as a ruin. When 
Joshua marched around it seven times, some three thousand 
years ago, and blew it down with his trumpet, he did the work 
so well and so completely that he hardly left enough of the 
city to cast a shadow. The curse pronounced against the re- 
building of it, has never been removed. One King, holding 
the curse in light estimation, made the attempt, but was 
stricken sorely for his presumption. Its site will always 
remain unoccupied ; and yet it is one of the very best locations 
for a town we have seen in all Palestine. 

At two in the morning they routed us out of bed — another 
piece of unwarranted cruelty — another stupid effort of our 
dragoman to get ahead of a rival. It was not two hours to the 
Jordan. However, we were dressed and under way before any 
one thought of looking to see what time it was, and so we 
drowsed on through the chill night air and dreamed of camp 
fires, warm beds, and other comfortable things. 

There was no conversation. People do not talk when they 
are cold, and wretched, and sleepy. We nodded in the saddle, 
at times, and woke up with a start to find that the procession 
had disappeared in the gloom. Then there was energy and 
attention to business until its dusky outlines came in sight 



"ON JORDAN'S STORMY BANKS." 593 

again. Occasionally the order was passed in a low voice down 
the line : " Close up — close up ! Bedouins lurk here, every 
where !" What an exquisite shudder it sent shivering along 
one's spine ! 

We reached the famous river before four o'clock, and the 
night was so black that we could have ridden into it without 
seeing it. Some of us were in an unhappy frame of mind. 
We waited and waited for daylight, but it did not come. Fi- 
nally we went away in the dark and slept an hour on the 
ground, in the bushes, and caught cold. It was a costly nap, 
on that account, but otherwise it was a paying investment 
because it brought unconsciousness of the dreary minutes and 
put us in a somewhat fitter mood for a first glimpse of the 
sacred river. 

With the first suspicion of dawn, every pilgrim took off his 
clothes and waded into the dark torrent, singing : 

" On Jordan's stormy banks I stand, 
And cast a wistful eye 
To Canaan's fair and happy land, 
Where my possessions lie." 

But they did not sing long. The water was so fearfully cold 
that they were obliged to stop singing and scamper out again. 
Then they stood on the bank shivering, and so chagrined and 
so grieved, that they merited honest compassion. Because an- 
other dream, another cherished hope, had failed. They had 
promised themselves all along that they would cross the Jordan 
where the Israelites crossed it when they entered Canaan from 
their long pilgrimage in the desert. They would cross where 
the twelve stones were placed in memory of that great event. 
While they did it they would picture to themselves that vast 
army of pilgrims marching through the cloven waters, bearing 
the hallowed ark of the covenant and shouting hosannahs, and 
singing songs of thanksgiving and praise. Each had promised 
himself that he would be the first to cross. They were at the 
goal of their hopes at last, but the current was too swifts the 
water was too cold ! 

38 



594 



THE DEAD SEA, 



It was then that Jack did them a service. With that engag- 
ing recklessness of consequences which is natural to youth, 
and so proper and so seemly, as well, he went and led the way 
across the Jordan, and all was happiness again. Every indi- 
vidual waded over, then, and stood upon the further bank. 
The water was not quite breast deep, any where. If it had 
been more, we could hardly have accomplished the feat, for the 
strong current would have swept us down the stream, and we 
would have been exhausted and drowned before reaching a 
place where we could make a landing. The main object com- 
passed, the drooping, miserable party sat down to wait for the 
sun again, for all wanted to see the water as well as feel it. 
But it was too cold a pastime. Some cans were filled from the 
holy river, some canes cut from its banks, and then we mount- 
ed and rode reluctantly away to keep from freezing to death. 
So we saw the Jordan very dimly. The thickets of bushes 
that bordered its banks threw their shadows across its shallow, 
turbulent waters (" stormy," the hymn makes them, which is 
rather a complimentary stretch of fancy,) and we could not 
judge of the width of the stream by the eye. We knew by 
our wading experience, however, that many streets in America 
are double as wide as the Jordan. 

Daylight came, soon after we got under way, and in the 

course of an hour or 
two we reached the 
Dead Sea. Nothing 
grows in the flat, 
burning desert 
around it but weeds 
and the Dead Sea 
apple the poets say 
is beautiful to the 
eye, but crumbles to 
ashes and dust when 
you break it. Such 
as we found were not 
handsome, but they were bitter to the taste. They yielded no 
dust. It was because they were not ripe, perhaps. 




THE DEAD SEA. 



THE DEAD SEA. 595 

The desert and the barren hills gleam painfully in the sun, 
around the Dead Sea, and there is no pleasant thing or living 
creature upon it or about its borders to cheer the eye. It is a 
scorching, arid, repulsive solitude. A silence broods over the 
scene that is depressing to the spirits. It makes one think of 
funerals and death. 

The Dead Sea is small. Its waters are very clear, and it 
has a pebbly bottom and is shallow for some distance out from 
the shores. It yields quantities of asphaltum ; fragments of it 
lie all about its banks ; this stuff gives the place something of 
an unpleasant smell. 

All our reading had taught us to expect that the first plunge 
into the Dead Sea would be attended with distressing results 
— our bodies would feel as if they were suddenly pierced by 
millions of red-hot needles ; the dreadful smarting would con- 
tinue for hours ; we might even look to be blistered from head 
to foot, and suffer miserably for many days. We were disap- 
pointed. Our eight sprang in at the same time that another 
party of pilgrims did, and nobody screamed once. None of 
them ever did complain of any thing more than a slight prick- 
ing sensation in places where their skin was abraded, and then 
only for a short time. My face smarted for a couple of hours, 
but it was partly because I got it badly sun-burned while I was 
bathing, and staid in so long that it became plastered over 
with salt. 

No, the water did not blister us ; it did not cover us with a 
slimy ooze and confer upon us an atrocious fragrance ; it was 
not very slimy ; and I could not discover that we smelt really 
any worse than we have always smelt since we have been in 
Palestine. It was only a different kind of smell, but not con- 
spicuous on that account, because we have a great deal of va- 
riety in that respect. "We didn't smell, there on the Jordan, 
the same as we do in Jerusalem ; and we don't smell in Jeru- 
salem just as we did in Nazareth, or Tiberias, or Cesarea Phi- 
lippi, or any of those other ruinous ancient towns in Galilee. 
No, we change all the time, and generally for the worse. We 
do our own washing. 



596 THE DEAD SEA. 

It was a funny bath. We could not sink. One could stretch 
himself at full length on his back, with his arms on his breast, 
and all of his body above a line drawn from the corner of his 
jaw past the middle of his side, the middle of his leg and 
through his ancle bone, would remain out of water. He could 
lift his head clear out, if he chose. No position can be retain- 
ed long ; you lose your balance and whirl over, first on 
your back and then on your face, and so on. You can lie com- 
fortably, on your back, with your head out, and your legs ouv 
from your knees down, by steadying yourself with your hands, 
You can sit, with your knees drawn up to your chin and youi 
arms clasped around them, but you are bound to turn ove* 
presently, because you are top-heavy in that position. You 
can stand up straight in water that is over your head, and from 
the middle of your breast upward you will not be wet. But 
you can not remain so. The water will soon float your feet to 
the surface. You can not swim on your back and make any 
progress of any consequence, because your feet stick away 
above the surface, and there is nothing to propel yourself with 
but your heels. If you swim on your face, you kick up the 
water like a stern-wheel boat. You make no headway. A 
horse is so top-heavy that he can neither swim nor stand up in 
the Dead Sea. He turns over on his side at once. Some of 
us bathed for more than an hour, and then came out coated 
with salt till we shone like icicles. We scrubbed it off with a 
coarse towel and rode off with a splendid brand-new smell, 
though it was one which was not any more disagreeable than 
those we have been for several weeks enjoying. It was the 
variegated villainy and novelty of it that charmed us. Salt 
crystals glitter in the sun about the shores of the lake. In 
places they coat the ground like a brilliant crust of ice. 

When I was a boy I somehow got the impression that the 
river Jordan was four thousand miles long and thirty-five miles 
wide. It is only ninety miles long, and so crooked that a man 
does not know which side of it he is on half the time. In 
going ninety miles it does not get over more than fifty miles 
of ground. It is not any wider than Broadway in New York. 



THE HERMITS OF MARS SABA. 597 

There is the Sea of Galilee and this Dead Sea — neither of them 
twenty miles long or thirteen wide. And yet when I was in 
Sunday School I thought they were sixty thousand miles in 
diameter. 

Travel and experience mar the grandest pictures and rob us 
of the most cherished traditions of our boyhood. "Well, let 
them go. I have already seen the Empire of King Solomon 
diminish to the size of the State of Pennsylvania ; I suppose 
I can bear the reduction of the seas and the river. 

We looked every where, as we passed along, but never saw 
grain or crystal of Lot's wife. It was a great disappointment. 
For many and many a year we had known her sad story, and 
taken that interest in her which misfortune always inspires. 
But she was gone. Her picturesque form no longer looms 
above the desert of the Dead Sea to remind the tourist of the 
doom that fell upon the lost cities. 

I can not describe the hideous afternoon's ride from the 
Dead Sea to Mars Saba. It oppresses me yet, to think of it. 
The sun so pelted us that the tears ran down our cheeks once 
or twice. The ghastly, treeless, grassless, breathless canons 
smothered us as if we had been in an oven. The sun had 
positive weight to it, I think. E"ot a man could sit erect under 
it. All drooped low in the saddles. John preached in this 
^Wilderness!" It must have been exhausting work. What 
». very heaven the massy towers and ramparts of vast Mars 
6aba looked to us when we caught a first glimpse of them ! 

We staid at this great convent all night, guests of the hos- 
pitable priects. Mars Saba, perched upon a crag, a human 
aest stuck high up against a perpendicular mountain wall, is 
h world of grand masonry that rises, terrace upon terrace away 
above your head, like the terraced and retreating colonnades 
one sees in fanciful pictures of Belshazzar's Feast and the pal- 
aces of the ancient Pharaohs. No other human dwelling is 
^ear. It was founded many ages ago by a holy recluse who 
lived at first in a cave in the rock — a cave which is inclosed in 
the convene walls, now, and was reverently shown to us by the 
priests. This recluse, by his rigorous torturing of his flesh, 



598 GOOD ST. SABA. 

his diet of bread and water, his utter withdrawal from all so- 
ciety and from the vanities of the world, and his constant 
prayer and saintly contemplation of a skull, inspired an emu- 
lation that brought about him many disciples. The precipice 
on the opposite side of the canon is well perforated with the 
small holes they dug in the rock to live in. The present occu- 
pants of Mars Saba, about seventy in number, are all hermits. 
They wear a coarse robe, an ugly, brimless stove-pipe of a hat, 
and go without shoes. They eat nothing whatever but bread 
and salt ; they drink nothing but water. As long as they live 
they can never go outside the walls, or look upon a woman — 
for no woman is permitted to enter Mars Saba, upon any pre- 
text whatsoever. 

Some of those men have been shut up there for thirty years. 
In all that dreary time they have not heard the laughter of a 
child or the blessed voice of a woman ; they have seen no 
human tears, no human smiles ; they have known no human 
joys, no wholesome human sorrows. In their hearts are no 
memories of the past, in their brains no dreams of the future. 
All that is lovable, beautiful, worthy, they have put far away 
from them ; against all things that are pleasant to look upon, 
and all sounds that are music to the ear, they have barred 
their massive doors and reared their relentless walls of stone 
forever. They have banished the tender grace of life and left 
only the sapped and skinny mockery. Their lips are lips that 
never kiss and never sing ; their hearts are hearts that never 
hate and never love ; their breasts are breasts that never swell 
with the sentiment, " I have a country and a flag." They are 
dead men who walk. 

I set down these first thoughts because they are natural — ■ 
not because they are just or because it is right to set them 
down. It is easy for book-makers to say " I thought so and so 
as I looked upon such and such a scene" — when the truth 
is, they thought all those fine things afterwards. One's first 
thought is not likely to be strictly accurate, yet it is no crime 
to think it and none to write it down, subject to modification 
by later experience. These hermits are dead men, in several 



UNSELFISH CATHOLIC BENEVOLENCE. 599 

respects, but not in all ; and it is not proper, that, thinking ill 
of them at first, I should go on doing so, or, speaking ill of 
them I should reiterate the words and stick to them. No, thej 
treated us too kindly for that. There is something human 
about them somewhere. They knew we were foreigners and 
Protestants, and not likely to feel admiration or much friend- 
liness toward them. But their large charity was above consid- 
ering such things. They simply saw in us men who were 
hungry, and thirsty, and tired, and that was sufficient. They 
opened their doors and gave us welcome. They asked no ques- 
tions, and they made no self-righteous display of their hospi- 
pitality. They fished for no compliments. They moved 
quietly about, setting the table for us, making the beds, and 
bringing water to wash in, and paid no heed when we said it 
was wrong for them to do that when we had men whose busi- 
ness it was to perform such offices. We fared most comfort- 
ably, and sat late at dinner. We walked all over the building 
with the hermits afterward, and then sat on the lofty battle- 
ments and smoked while we enjoyed the cool air, the wild 
scenery and the sunset. One or two chose cosy bed-rooms to 
sleep in, but the nomadic instinct prompted the rest to sleep 
on the broad divan that extended around the great hall, be- 
cause it seemed like sleeping out of doors, and so was more 
cheery and inviting. It was a royal rest we had. 

When we got up to breakfast in the morning, we were new 
men. For all this hospitality no strict charge was made. We 
could give something if we chose ; we need give nothing, if 
we were poor or if we were stingy. The pauper and the miser 
are as free as any in the Catholic Convents of Palestine. I 
have been educated to enmity toward every thing that is Cath- 
olic, and sometimes, in consequence of this, I find it much 
easier to discover Catholic faults than Catholic merits. But 
there is one thing I feel no disposition to overlook, and no dis- 
position to forget : and that is, the honest gratitude I and all 
pilgrims owe, to the Convent Fathers in Palestine. Their 
doors are always open, and there is always a welcome for any 
worthy man who comes, whether he comes in rags or clad in 



600 PLAIN OF THE SHEPHERDS. 

purple. The Catholic Convents are a priceless blessing to the 
poor. A pilgrim without money, whether he be a Protestant 
or a Catholic, can travel the length and breadth of Palestine, 
and in the midst of her desert wastes find wholesome food and 
a clean bed every night, in these buildings. Pilgrims in better 
circumstances are often stricken down by the sun and the 
fevers of the country, and then their saving refuge is the Con- 
vent. Without these hospitable retreats, travel in Palestine 
would be a pleasure which none but the strongest men could 
dare to undertake. Our party, pilgrims and all, will always 
be ready and always willing, to touch glasses and drink health, 
prosperity and long life to the Convent Fathers of Palestine. 

So, rested and refreshed, we fell into line and filed away 
over the barren mountains of Judea, and along rocky ridges 
and through sterile gorges, where eternal silence and solitude 
reigned. Even the scattering groups of armed shepherds we 
met the afternoon before, tending their flocks of long-haired 
goats, were wanting here. We saw but two living creatures. 
They were gazelles, of " soft-eyed " notoriety. They looked 
like very young kids, but they annihilated distance like an ex- 
press train. I have not seen animals that moved faster, unless 
I might say it of the antelopes of our own great plains. 

At nine or ten in the morning we reached the Plain of the 
Shepherds, and stood in a walled garden of olives where the 
shepherds were watching their flocks by night, eighteen centu- 
ries ago, when the multitude of angels brought them the 
tidings that the Saviour was born. A quarter of a mile away 
was Bethlehem of Judea, and the pilgrims took some of the 
stone wall and hurried on. 

The Plain of the Shepherds is a desert, paved with loose 
stones, void of vegetation, glaring in the fierce sun. Only the 
music of the angels it knew once could charm its shrubs and 
flowers to life again and restore its vanished beauty. No less 
potent enchantment could avail to work this miracle. 

In the huge Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem, built fifteen 
hundred years ago by the inveterate St. Helena, they took us 
below ground, and into a grotto cut in the living rock. This was 



THE FAMOUS "MILK GROTTO." 601 

the " manger " where Christ was born. A silver star set in the 
floor bears a Latin inscription to that effect. It is polished 
with the kisses of many generations of worshiping pilgrims. 
The grotto was tricked out in the usual tasteless style observ- 
able in all the holy places of Palestine. As in the Church of 
the Holy Sepulchre, envy and uncharitableness were apparent 
here. The priests and the members of the Greek and Latin 
Churches can not come by the same corridor to kneel in the 
sacred birthplace of the Redeemer, but are compelled to ap- 
proach and retire by different avenues, lest they quarrel and 
fight on this holiest ground on earth. 

I have no " meditations," suggested by this spot where the 
very first " Merry Christmas !" was uttered in all the world, 
and from whence the friend of my childhood, Santa Claus, de- 
parted on his first journey, to gladden and continue to gladden 
roaring firesides on wintry mornings in many a distant land 
forever and forever. I touch, with reverent finger, the actual 
spot where the infant Jesus lay, but I think — nothing. 

You can not think in this place any more than you can in 
any other in Palestine that would be likely to inspire reflection. 
Beggars, cripples and monks compass you about, and make 
you think only of bucksheesh when you would rather think of 
something more in keeping with the character of the spot. 

I was glad to get away, and glad when we had walked 
through the grottoes where Eusebius wrote, and Jerome fasted, 
and Joseph prepared for the flight into Egypt, and the dozen 
other distinguished grottoes, and knew we were done. The 
Church of the Nativity is almost as well packed with exceed- 
ing holy places as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself. 
They even have in it a grotto wherein twenty thousand chil- 
dren were slaughtered by Herod when he was seeking the life 
of the infant Saviour. 

We went to the Milk Grotto, of course — a cavern where 
Mary hid herself for a while before the flight into Egypt. Its 
walls were black before she entered, but in suckling the Child, 
a drop of her milk fell upon the floor and instantly changed 
the darkness of the walls to its own snowy hue. We took 



60'A 



EXHAUSTED 



many little fragments of stone from here, because it is well 
known in all the East that a barren woman hath need only to 
touch her lips to one of these and her failing will depart from 
her. We took many specimens, to the end that we might con- 
fer happiness upon certain households that we wot of. 

We got away from Bethlehem and its troops of beggars and 
relic-peddlers in the afternoon, and after spending some little 
time at Rachel's tomb, hurried to Jerusalem as fast as possible. 
I never was so glad to get home again before. I never have 
enjoyed rest as I have enjoyed it during these last few hours. 
The journey to the Dead Sea, the Jordan and Bethlehem was 
short, but it was an exhausting one. Such roasting heat, such 
oppressive solitude, and such dismal desolation can not surely 
exist elsewhere on earth. And such fatigue ! 

The commonest sagacity warns me that I ought to tell the 
customary pleasant lie, and say I tore myself reluctantly away 
from every noted place in Palestine. Every body tells that, 
but with as little ostentation as I may, I doubt the word of 
every he who tells it. I could take a dreadful oath that I have 
never heard any one of our forty pilgrims say any thing of the 
sort, and they are as worthy and as sincerely devout as any 
that come here. They will say it when they get home, fast 
enough, but why should they not % They do not wish to array 
themselves against all the Lamartines and Grimeses in the 
world. It does not stand to reason that men are reluctant to 
leave places where the very life is almost badgered out of them 
by importunate swarms of beggars and peddlers who hang in 
strings to one's sleeves and coat-tails and shriek and shout in 
his ears and horrify his vision with the ghastly sores and mal- 
formations they exhibit. One is glad to get away. I have 
heard shameless people say they were glad to get away from 
Ladies' Festivals where they were importuned to buy by bevies 
of lovely young ladies. Transform those houris into dusky 
hags and ragged savages, and replace their rounded forms with 
shrunken and knotted distortions, their soft hands with scarred 
and hideous deformities, and the persuasive music of their 
voices with the discordant din of a hated language, and then 



AFTER THOUGHTS. 603 

see how much lingering reluctance to leave could be mustered. 
No, it is the neat thing to say you were reluctant, and then 
append the profound thoughts that " struggled for utterance," 
in your brain ; but it is the true thing to say you were not 
reluctant, and found it impossible to think at all — though in 
good sooth it is not respectable to say it, and not poetical, 
either. 

We do not think, in the holy places ; we think in bed, after- 
wards, when the glare, and the noise, and the confusion are 
gone, and in fancy we revisit alone, the solemn monuments of 
the past, and summon the phantom pageants of an age that 
has passed away. 



CHAPTEE LVI. 

"TTT"E visited all the holy places about Jerusalem which we 

V V had left uu visited when we journeyed to the Jordan, 
and then, about three o'clock one afternoon, we fell into pro- 
cession and marched out at the stately Damascus gate, and the 
walls of Jerusalem shut us out forever. We paused on the 
summit of a distant hill and took a final look and made a final 
farewell to the venerable city which had been such a good 
home to us. 

For about four hours we traveled down hill constantly. 
We followed a narrow bridle-path which traversed the beds of 
the mountain gorges, and when we could we got out of the 
way of the long trains of laden camels and asses, and when we 
could not we suffered the misery of being mashed up against 
perpendicular walls of rock aud having our legs bruised by the 
passing freight. Jack was caught two or three times, and Dan 
and Moult as often. One horse had a heavy fall on the slip- 
pery rocks, and the others had narrow escapes. However, 
this was as good a road as we had found in Palestine, and pos- 
sibly even the best, and so there was not much grumbling. 

Sometimes, in the glens, we came upon luxuriant orchards 
of figs, apricots, pomegranates, and such things, but oftener 
the scenery was rugged, mountainous, verdureless and forbid- 
ding. Here and there, towers were perched high up on accliv- 
ities which seemed almost inaccessible. This fashion is as 
old as Palestine itself and was adopted in ancient times for se- 
curity against enemies. 

We crossed the brook which furnished David the stone that 



THE PILGEIMAGE ENDED. 605 

killed Goliah, and no doubt we looked upon the very ground 
whereon that noted battle was fought. We passed by a 
picturesque old gothic ruin whose stone pavements had rung 
to the armed heels of many a valorous Crusader, and we rode 
through a piece of country which we were told once knew 
Samson as a citizen. 

We staid all night with the good monks at the convent 
of Ramleh, and in the morning got up and galloped the horses 
a good part of the distance from there to Jaffa, or Joppa, for 
the plain was as level as a floor and free from stones, and 
besides this was our last march in Holy Land. These two 
or three hours finished, we and the tired horses could have rest 
and sleep as long as we wanted it. This was the plain of 
which Joshua spoke when he said, " Sun, stand thou still od 
Gibeon, and thou moon in the valley of Ajalon." As we drew 
near to Jaffa, the boys spurred up the horses and indulged in 
the excitement of an actual race — an experience we had hardly 
had since we raced on donkeys in the Azores islands. 

We came finally to the noble grove of orange-trees in which 
the Oriental city of Jaffa lies buried ; we passed through the 
walls, and rode again down narrow streets and among swarms 
of animated rags, and saw other sights and had other experi- 
ences we had long been familiar with. We dismounted, for 
the last time, and out in the offing, riding at anchor, we saw 
the ship ! I put an exclamation point there because we felt 
one when we saw the vessel. The long pilgrimage was ended, 
and somehow we seemed to feel glad of it. 

[For description of Jaffa, see Universal Gazetteer.] Simon 
the Tanner formerly lived here. We went to his house. All 
the pilgrims visit Simon the Tanner's house. Peter saw the 
vision of the beasts let down in a sheet when he lay upon the 
roof of Simon the Tanner's house. It was from Jaffa that 
Jonah sailed when he was told to go and prophesy against 
Kineveh, and no doubt it was not far from the town that the 
whale threw him up when he discovered that he had no ticket. 
Jonah was disobedient, and of a fault-finding, complaining dis- 
position 3 and deserves to be lightly spoken of, almost. The 



606 INFOKMATION ABOUT JAFFA. 

timbers used in the construction of Solomon's temple were 
floated to Jaffa in rafts, and the narrow opening in the reef 
through which they passed to the shore is not an inch wider or 
a shade less dangerous to navigate than it was then. Such is 
the sleepy nature of the population Palestine's only good sea- 
port has now and always had. Jaffa has a history and a stir- 
ring one. It will not be discovered any where in this book. If 
the reader will call at the circulating library and mention my 
name, he will be furnished with books which will afford him 
the fullest information concerning Jaffa. 

So ends the pilgrimage. We ought to be glad that we did 
not make it for the purpose of feasting our eyes upon fascina- 
ting aspects of nature, for we should have been disappointed — 
at least at this season of the year. A writer in " Life in the 
Holy Land " observes : 

" Monotonous and uninviting as much of the Holy Land will appear to persons 
accustomed to the almost constant verdure of flowers, ample streams and varied sur- 
face of our own country, we must remember that its aspect to the Israelites after 
the weary march of forty years through the desert must have been very different." 

Which all of us will freely grant. But it truly is " monoto- 
nous and uninviting," and there is no sufficient reason for de- 
scribing it as being otherwise. 

Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Pales- 
tine must be the prince. The hills are barren, they are dull of 
color, they are unpicturesque in shape. The valleys are un- 
sightly deserts fringed with a feeble vegetation that has an ex- 
pression about it of being sorrowful and despondent. The Dead 
Sea and the Sea of Galilee sleep in the midst of a vast stretch 
of hill and plain wherein the eye rests upon no pleasant tint, 
no striking object, no soft picture dreaming in a purple haze or 
mottled with the shadows of the clouds. Every outline is 
harsh, every feature is distinct, there is no perspective — dis- 
tance works no enchantment here. It is a hopeless, dreary, 
heart-broken land. 

Small shreds and patches of it must be very beautiful in the 
full flush of spring, however, and all the more beautiful by 



PRESENT PALESTINE. 607 

contrast with the far-reaching desolation that surrounds them 
on every side. I would like much to see the fringes of the 
Jordan in spring-time, and Shechem, Esdraelon, Ajalon and 
the borders of Galilee — but even then these spots would seem 
mere toy gardens set at wide intervals in the waste of a limit- 
less desolation. 

Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the 
spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its en- 
ergies. Where Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and 
towers, that solemn sea now floods the plain, in whose bitter 
waters no living thing exists — over whose waveless surface the 
blistering air hangs motionless and dead — about whose borders 
nothing grows but weeds, and scattering tufts of cane, and that 
treacherous fruit that promises refreshment to parching lips, 
but turns to ashes at the touch. Nazareth is forlorn ; about 
that ford of Jordan where the hosts of Israel entered the 
Promised Land with songs of rejoicing, one finds only a squalid 
camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert ; Jericho the accursed, 
lies a moldering ruin, to-day, even as Joshua's miracle left it 
more than three thousand years ago ; Bethlehem and Bethany, 
in their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about 
them now to remind one that they once knew the high honor 
of the Saviour's presence ; the hallowed spot where the shep- 
herds watched their flocks by night, and where the angels sang 
Peace on earth, good will to men, is untenanted by any living 
creature, and unblessed by any feature that is pleasant to the 
eye. Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest name in history, 
has lost all its ancient grandeur, and is become a pauper vil- 
lage ; the riches of Solomon are no longer there to compel the 
admiration of visiting Oriental queens ; the wonderful tem- 
ple which was the pride and the glory of Israel, is gone, and 
the Ottoman crescent is lifted above the spot where, on that 
most memorable day in the annals of the world, they reared 
the Holy Cross. The noted Sea of Galilee, where Eoman 
fleets once rode at anchor and the disciples of the Saviour sailed 
in their ships, was long ago deserted by the devotees of war 
and commerce, and its borders are a silent wilderness ; Caper- 



608 PRESENT PALESTINE. 

naum is a shapeless ruin ; Magdala is the home of beggared 
Arabs ; Bethsaida and Chorazin have vanished from the earth, 
and the " desert places" round about them where thousands of 
men once listened to the Saviour's voice and ate the miraculous 
bread, sleep in the hush of a solitude that is inhabited only by 
birds of prey and skulking foxes. 

Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be 
otherwise % Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land % 

Palestine is no more of this work-day world. It is sacred 
to poetry and tradition — it is dream-land. 



CHAPTER LVII. 

IT was worth a kingdom to be at sea again. It was a relief 
to drop all anxiety whatsoever — all questions as to where 
we should go ; how long we should stay ; whether it were worth 
while to go or not ; all anxieties about the condition of the 
horses ; all such questions as " Shall we ever get to water?" 
" Shall we ever lunch ?" " Ferguson, how many more million 
miles have we got to creep under this awful sun before we 
camp ?" It was a relief to cast all these torturing little anxieties 
far away — ropes of steel they were, and every one with a separate 
and distinct strain on it — and feel the temporary contentment 
that is born of the banishment of all care and responsibility. 
We did not look at the compass : we did not care, now, where 
the ship went to, so that she went out of sight of land as quickly 
as possible. When I travel again, I wish to go in a pleasure 
ship. No amount of money could have purchased for us, in a 
strange vessel and among unfamiliar faces, the perfect satis- 
faction and the sense of being at home again which we expe- 
rienced when we stepped on board the " Quaker City," — our 
own ship — after this wearisome pilgrimage. It is a something 
we have felt always when we returned to her, and a something 
we had no desire to sell. 

We took off our blue woollen shirts, our spurs, and heavy 
boots, our sanguinary revolvers and our buckskin-seated panta- 
loons, and got shaved and came out in Christian costume once 
more. All but Jack, who changed all other articles of his 
dress, but clung to his traveling pantaloons. They still pre- 
served their ample buckskin seat intact ; and so his short pea- 
jacket and his long, thin legs assisted to make him a pictu- 

39 



610 



FATHERLY ADVICE, 



resque object whenever he stood on the forecastle looking abroad 
upon the ocean over the bows. At such times his father's last 
injunction suggested itself to me. He said : 

" Jack, my boy, you are about to go among a brilliant com- 
pany of gentlemen and ladies, who are refined and cultivated, 
and thoroughly accomplished in the manners and customs of 
good society. Listen to their conversation, study their habits 
of life, and learn. Be polite and obliging to all, and considerate 
towards every one's opinions, failings and prejudices. Command 
the just respect of all your fellow-voyagers, even though you 
fail to win their friendly regard. And Jack — don't you ever 
dare, while you live, appear in public on those decks in fair 
weather, in a costume unbecoming your mother's drawing- 
room !" 

It would have been 
worth any price if the 
father of this hopeful 
youth could have stepped 
on board some time, and 
seen him standing high 
on the fore-castle, pea- 
jacket, tasseled red fez, 
buckskin patch and all, 
— placidly contemplat- 
ing the ocean — a rare 
spectacle for any body's 
drawing-room. 

After a pleasant voyage 
and a good rest, we drew 
near to Egypt and out of 
the mellowest of sunsets 
we saw the domes and 
minarets of Alexandria 
rise into view. As soon 
as the anchor was down, 
Jack and I got a boat and went ashore. It was night by this 
time, and the other passengers were content to remain at home 




REAR ELEVATION OF JACK. 



IN EGYPT. 



611 



and visit ancient Egypt after breakfast. It was the way they 
did at Constantinople. They took a lively interest in new 
countries, bnt their school-boy impatience had worn off, and 
they had learned that it was wisdom to take things easy and 
go along comfortably — these old countries do not go away in 
the night ; they stay till after breakfast. 

When we reached the pier we found an army of Egyptian 
boys with donkeys no larger than themselves, waiting for pas- 
sengers — for donkeys are the omnibuses of Egypt. We pre- 
ferred to walk, but we could not have our own way. The 
boys crowded about us, clamored around us, and slewed their 
donkeys exactly across our path, no matter which way we 
turned. They were good-natured rascals, and so were the 
donkeys. We mounted, and the boys ran behind us and kept 
the donkeys in a furious gallop, as is the fashion at Damascus. 




STREET IN ALEXANDRIA. 



I believe I would rather ride a donkey than any beast in the 
world. He goes briskly, he puts on no airs, he is docile, though 



«12 



ADVENT OF THE LOST TRIBES, 



opinionated. Satan himself could not scare him, and he is con- 
venient — very convenient. When you are tired riding you cam 
rest your feet on the ground and let him gallop from under you. 
We found the hotel and secured rooms, and were happy to 
know that the Prince of Wales had stopped there once. They 
liad it everywhere on signs. No other princes had stopped 
there since, till Jack and I came. We went abroad through 
the town, then, and found it a city of huge commercial build- 
ings, and broad, handsome streets brilliant with gas-light. By 
might it was a sort of reminiscence £>f Paris. But finally Jack 
ibund an ice-cream saloon, and that closed investigations for 
that evening. The weather was very hot, it had been many a 
day since Jack had seen ice-cream, and so it was useless te 
talk of leaving the saloon till it shut up. 

In the morning the lost tribes of America came ashore and 
infested the hotels and took possession of all the donkeys and 
other open barouches that offered. They went in picturesque 
procession to the American Consul's ; to the great gardens ; to 

Cleopatra's Needles; to 
Pompey's Pillar ; to the 
palace of the Viceroy of 
Egypt; to the Nile; to 
the superb groves of date- 
palms. One of our most 
inveterate relic-hunten 
had his hammer with 
him, and tried to break a 
fragment off the upright 
Needle and could not d# 
it ; he tried the prostrate 
one and failed; he bor- 
rowed a heavy sledge 
hammer from a masom 
and failed again. He 
tried Pompey's Pillar, and 
this baffled him. Scattered all about the mighty monolith were 
sphinxes of noble countenance, carved out of Egyptian granite as 




VICEROY OF EGYPT. 



THE RELIC-HUNTER. 61S 

hard as blue steel, and whose shapely features the wear of five 
thousand years had failed to mark or mar. The relic-hunter 
battered at these persistently, and sweated profusely over hi& 
work. He might as well have attempted to deface the 
moon. They regarded him serenely with the stately smile 
they had worn so long, and which seemed to say, "Peck 
away, poor insect ; we were not made to fear such as you ; 
in ten-score dragging ages we have seen more of your kind 
than there are sands at your feet : have they left a blemish 
upon us ?" 

But I am forgetting the Jaffa Colonists. At Jaffa we had 
taken on board some forty members of a very celebrated com- 
munity. They were male and female ; babies, young boys and 
young girls ; young married people, and some who had passed a 
shade beyond the prime of life. I refer to the " Adams Jaffa 
Colony." Others had deserted before. We left in Jaffa Mr. 
Adams, his wife, and fifteen unfortunates who not only had no- 
money but did not know where to turn or whither to go. Such 
was the statement made to us. Our forty were miserable 
enough in the first place, and they lay about the decks seasick 
all the voyage, which about completed their misery, I take it. 
However, one or two young men remained upright, and by 
constant persecution we wormed out of them some little infor- 
mation. They gave it reluctantly and in a very fragmentary 
condition, for, having been shamefully humbugged by their 
prophet, they felt humiliated and unhappy. In such circum- 
stances people do not like to talk. 

The colony was a complete fiasco. I have already said that 
«uch as could get away did so, from time to time. The 
prophet Adams — once an actor, then several other things, after- 
ward a Mormon and a missionary, always an adventurer — re- 
mains at Jaffa with his handful of sorrowful subjects. The 
forty we brought away with us were chiefly destitute, though 
not all of them. They wished to get to Egypt. What might 
become of them then they did not know and probably did not 
eare — any thing to get away from hated Jaffa. They had little 
to hope for. Because after many appeals to the sympathies of 



614 



THE JAFFA COLONISTS. 



New England, made by strangers of Boston, through the news- 
papers, and after the establishment of an office there for the 
reception of moneyed contributions for the Jaffa colonists, 

One Dollar was sub- 
scribed. The consul- 
general for Egypt 
showed me the news- 
paper paragraph 
which mentioned the 
circumstance and men- 
tioned also the discon- 
tinuance of the effort 
and the closing of the 
office. It was evident 
that practical New 
England was not sorry 
to be rid of such vis- 
ionaries and was not 
in the least inclined 
to hire any body to 
bring them back to 
her. Still, to get to Egypt, was something, in the eyes of the 
unfortunate colonists, hopeless as the prospect seemed of ever 
getting further. 

Thus circumstanced, they landed at Alexandria from our 
ship. One of our passengers, Mr. Moses S. Beach, of the New 
York Sun, inquired of the consul-general what it would cost 
to send these people to their home in Maine by the way of 
Liverpool, and he said fifteen hundred dollars in gold would 
do it. Mr. Beach gave his check for the money and so the 
troubles of the Jaffa colonists were at an end.* 

Alexandria was too much like a European city to be novel, 
and we soon tired of it. We took the cars and came up here 

*It was an unselfish act of benevolence; it was done without any ostentation, 
and has never been mentioned in any newspaper, I think. Therefore it is refresh- 
ing to learn now, several months after the above narrative was written, that 
another man received all the credit of this rescue of the colonists. Such is life. 




EASTERN MONARCH. 



THE GIFTED PORTER. 



615 



to ancient Cairo, which is an Oriental city and of the coin- 
pletest pattern. There is little about it to disabuse one's mind 
of the error if he should 
take it into his head that 
he was in the heart of Ara- 
bia. Stately camels and 
dromedaries, swarthy 
Egyptians, and likewise 
Turks and black Ethio- 
pians, turbaned, sashed, 
and blazing in a rich va- 
riety of Oriental costumes 
of all shades of flashy 
colors, are what one sees 
on every hand crowding 
the narrow streets and 
the honeycombed ba- 
zaars. We are stopping 
at Shepherd's Hotel, 
which is the worst on earth except the one I stopped at once 
in a small town in the United States. It is pleasant to read 
this sketch in my note-book, now, and know that I can stand 
Shepherd's Hotel, sure, because I have been in one just like it 
in America and survived : 




MOSES S. BEACH. 



I stopped at the Benton House. It used to be a good hotel, but that proves 
nothing — I used to be a good boy, for that matter. Both of us have lost character 
of late years. The Beaton is not a good hotel. The Benton lacks a very great 
deal of being a good hotel. Perdition is full of better hotels than the Benton. 

It was late at night when I got there, and I told the clerk I would like plenty 
of lights, because I wanted to read an hour or two. When I reached No. 15 with 
the porter (we came along a dim hall that was clad in ancient carpeting, faded, 
worn out in many places, and patched with old scraps of oil cloth — a hall that sank 
under one's feet, and creaked dismally to every footstep,) he struck a light — two 
inches of sallow, sorrowful, consumptive tallow candle, that burned blue, and sput- 
tered, and got discouraged and went out. The porter lit it again, and I asked if that 
was all the light the clerk sent. He said, " Oh no, I've got another one here," and 
he produced another couple of inches of tallow candle. I said, "Light them both 
— I'll have to have one to see the other by." He did it, but the result was drearier 
than darkness itself. He was a cheery, accommodating rascal. He said he would 



616 THE GIFTED PORTER. 

go " somewheres " and steal a lamp. I abetted and encouraged him in his criminal 
design. I heard the landlord get after him in the hall ten minutes afterward. 

"Where are you going with that lamp?" 

" Fifteen wants it, sir." 

"Fifteen! why he's got a double lot of candles — does the man want to illumi- 
nate the house ? — does he want to get up a torch-light procession ? — what is he up 
to, any how?" 

" He don't like them candles — says he wants a lamp." 

"Why what in the nation does — why I never heard of such a thing? What ob 
earth can he want with that lamp ?" 

" Well, he only wants to read — that's what he says." 

"Wants to read, does he? — ain't satisfied with a thousand candles, but has to 
have a lamp ! — I do wonder what the devil that fellow wants that lamp for? Take 
him another candle, and then if " 

" But he wants the lamp — says he'll burn the d — d old house down if he don't 
get a lamp!" (a remark which I never made.) 

" I'd like to see him at it once. Well, you take it along — but I swear it beate 
my time, though — and see if you can't find out what in the very nation he wanU 
with that lamp." 

And he went off growling to himself and still wondering and wondering over the 
unaccountable conduct of No. 15. The lamp was a good one, but it revealed some 
disagreeable things — a bed in the suburbs of a desert of room — a bed that had hills 
and valleys in it, and you'd have to accommodate your body to the impression left 
in it by the man that slept there last, before you could lie comfortably ; a carpet 
that had seen better days ; a melancholy washstand in a remote corner, and a de- 
jected pitcher on it sorrowing over a broken nose ; a looking-glass split across the 
centre, which chopped your head off at the chin and made you look like some 
dreadful unfinished monster or other; the paper peeling in shreds from the walls. 

I sighed and said: "This is charming; and now don't you think you could get 
me something to read ?" 

The porter said, "Oh, certainly; the old man's got dead loads of books;" and he 
was gone before I could tell him what sort of literature I would rather have. And 
yet his countenance expressed the utmost confidence in his ability to execute the 
commission with credit to himself. The old man made a descent on him. 

"What are you going to do with that pile of books?" 

"Fifteen wants 'em, sir." 

" Fifteen, is it ? He'll want a warming-pan, next — he'll want a nurse ! Take 
him every thing there is in the house — take him the bar-keeper — take him the bag- 
gage-wagon — take him a chamber-maid ! Confound me, I never saw any thing like 
it. What did he say he wants with those books ?" 

"Wants to read 'em, like enough; it ain't likely he wants to eat 'em, I don't 
reckon." 

"Wants to read 'em — wants to read 'em this time of night, the infernal lunatic 1 
Well, he can't have them." 

" But he says he's mor'ly bound to have 'em ; he says he'll just go a-rairin' and 
a-chargin' through this house and raise more well, there's no tellin' what he 



THE GIFTED PORTEE. 



617 



won't do if he don't get 'em ; because he's drunk and crazy and desperate, and 
Mothing'll soothe him down but them cussed books." [I had not made any threats, 
and was not in the condi- 
tion ascribed to me by the 
porter.] 

"Well, goon; but I will 
be around when he goes to 
rairing and charging, and 
the first rair he makes I'll 
make him rair out of the 
window." And then the 
eld gentleman went off, 
growling as before. 

The genius of that por- 
ter was something won- 
derful. He put an armful 
•f books on the bed and 
said " Good night " as con- 
fidently as if he knew per- 
fectly well that those books 
were exactly my style of 
reading matter. And well 

he might. His selection covered the whole range of legitimate literature. It com- 
prised "The Great Consummation," by Rev. Dr. Cummings — theology; "Revised 
Statutes of the State of Missouri" — law; "The Complete Horse-Doctor" — medi- 
cine; "The Toilers of the Sea," by Victor Hugo — romance; "The works of 
William Shakspeare " — poetry. I shall never cease to admire the tact and th« 
intelligence of that gifted porter. 




ROOM no. 15. 



But all the donkeys in Christendom, and most of the Egyp- 
tian boys, I think, are at the door, and there is some noise 
going on, not to put it in stronger language. — We are about 
starting to the illustrious Pyramids of Egypt, and the donkeys 
for the voyage are under inspection. I will go and select one 
before the choice animals are all taken. 



OHAPTEE LVIII. 

THE donkeys were all good, all handsome, all strong and in 
good condition, all fast and all willing to prove it. They 
were the best we had found any where, and the most recherche. 
I do not know what recherche is, but that is what these donkeys 
were, anyhow. Some were of a soft mouse-color, and the 
others were white, black, and vari-colored. Some were close- 
shaven, all over, except that a tuft like a paint-brush was left 
on the end of the tail. Others were so shaven in fanciful land- 
scape garden patterns, as to mark their bodies with curving 
lines, which were bounded on one side by hair and on the other 
by the close plush left by the shears. They had all been newly 
barbered, and were exceedingly stylish. Several of the white 
ones were barred like zebras with rainbow stripes of blue and. 
red and yellow paint. These were indescribably gorgeous. Dan 
and Jack selected from this lot because they brought back Ital- 
ian reminiscences of the " old masters." The saddles were the 
high, stuffy, frog-shaped things we had known in Ephesus and 
Smyrna. The donkey-boys were lively young Egyptian ras- 
cals who could follow a donkey and keep him in a canter half 
a day without tiring. We had plenty of spectators when we 
mounted, for the hotel was full of English people bound over- 
land to India and officers getting ready for the African cam- 
paign against the Abyssinian King Theodorus. We were not 
a very large party, but as we charged through the streets of th$ 
great metropolis, we made noise for five hundred, and dis- 
played activity and created excitement in proportion. Nobody 
can steer a donkey, and some collided with camels, dervishes, 



A WILD RIDE. 619 

effendis, asses, beggars and every tiling else that offered to the 
donkeys a reasonable chance for a collision. When we turned 
into the broad avenue that leads out of the city toward Old 
Cairo, there was plenty of room. The walls of stately date- 
palms that fenced the gardens and bordered the way, threw 
their shadows down and made the air cool and bracing. We 
rose to the spirit of the time and the race became a wild rout, a 
stampede, a terrific panic. I wish to live to enjoy it again. 

Somewhere along this route we had a few startling exhibi- 
tions of Oriental simplicity. A girl apparently thirteen years 
of age came along the great thoroughfare dressed like Eve be- 
fore the fall. We would have called her thirteen at home ; 
but here girls who look thirteen are often not more than 
nine, in reality. Occasionally we saw stark-naked men of su- 
perb build, bathing, and making no attempt at concealment. 
However, an hour's acquaintance with this cheerful custom 
reconciled the pilgrims to it, and then it ceased to occasion 
remark. Thus easily do even the most startling novelties grow 
tame and spiritless to these sight-surfeited wanderers. 

Arrived at Old Gairo, the camp-followers took up the don- 
keys and tumbled them bodily aboard a small boat with a la- 
teen sail, and we followed and got under way. The deck was 
closely packed with donkeys and men ; the two sailors had to 
climb over and under and through the wedged mass to work 
the sails, and the steersman had to crowd four or five donkeys 
out of the way when he wished to swing his tiller and put his 
helm hard-down. But what were their troubles to us ? We 
had nothing to do ; nothing to do but enjoy the trip ; nothing 
to do but shove the donkeys off our corns and look at the charm- 
ing scenery of the Nile. 

On the island at our right was the machine they call the ki- 
lometer, a stone-column whose business it is to mark the rise of 
the river and prophecy whether it will reach only thirty -two 
feet and produce a famine, or whether it will properly flood 
the land at forty and produce plenty, or whether it will rise 
to forty-three and bring death and destruction to flocks and 
crops — but how it does all this they could not explain to us so 



620 



MOSES IN THE BULRUSHES, 



that we could understand On the same island is still show* 
the spot where Pharaoh's daughter found Moses in the bul- 
rushes. Near the spot we 
sailed from, the Holy Fam- 
ily dwelt when they so- 
journed in Egypt till Her- 
od should complete his 
slaughter of the innocents. 
The same tree they rested 
under when they first ar- 
rived, was there a short 
time ago, but the Viceroy 
of Egypt sent it to the Em- 
press Eugenie lately. He 
was just in time, otherwise 
our pilgrims would have 
had it. 

The Nile at this point is 
muddy, swift and turbid, 
and does not lack a great 
deal of being as wide as the 
Mississippi. 

We scrambled up the 
steep bank at the shabby 
town of Ghizeh, mounted 
the donkeys again, and 
scampered away. For four 
or five miles the route lay 
along a high embankment which they say is to be the bed of 
a railway the Sultan means to build for no other reason than 
that when the Empress of the French comes to visit him she 
can go to the Pyramids in comfort. This is true Oriental hos- 
pitality. I am very glad it is our privilege to have donkeys 
instead of cars. 

At the distance of a few miles the Pyramids rising above the 
palms, looked very clean-cut, very grand and imposing, and 
very soft and filmy, as well. They swam in a rich haze that 




NILOMETER. 



DISTANT VIEW OF THE PYRAMIDS. 621 

took from them all suggestions of unfeeling stone, and made 
them seem only the airy nothings of a dream — structures 
which might blossom into tiers of vague arches, or ornate col- 
onnades, may be, and change and change again, into all grace- 
fill forms of architecture, while we looked, and then melt deli- 
eiously away and blend with the tremulous atmosphere. 

At the end of the levee we left the mules and went in a sail- 
boat across an arm of the Nile or an overflow, and landed 
where the sands of the Great Sahara left their embankment, 
as straight as a wall, along the verge of the alluvial plain of 
the river. A laborious walk in the flaming sun brought us to 
the foot of the great Pyramid of Cheops. It was a fairy vision 
no longer. It was a corrugated, unsightly mountain of stone. 
Each of its monstrous sides was a wide stairway which rose 
upward, step above step, narrowing as it went, till it tapered 
to a point far aloft in the air. Insect men and women — pil- 
grims from the Quaker City — were creeping about its dizzy 
perches, and one little black swarm were waving postage 
stamps from the airy summit — handkerchiefs will be under- 
stood. 

Of course we were besieged by a rabble of muscular Egyp- 
tians and Arabs who wanted the contract of dragging us to the 
top — all tourists are. Of course you could not hear your own 
voice for the din that was around you. Of course the Sheiks 
aaid they were the only responsible parties ; that all contracts 
must be made with them, all moneys paid over to them, and 
none exacted from us by any but themselves alone. Of course 
they contracted that the varlets who dragged us up should not 
mention bucksheesh once. For such is the usual routine. Of 
course we contracted with them, paid them, were delivered into 
the hands of the draggers, dragged up the Pyramids, and har- 
ried and be-deviled for bucksheesh from the foundation clear to 
the summit. We paid it, too, for we were purposely spread 
very far apart over the vast side of the Pyramid. There was 
no help near if we called, and the Herculeses who dragged us 
had a way of asking sweetly and flatteringly for bucksheesh, 
which was seductive, and of looking fierce and threatening to 



622 



THE ASCENT. 



throw us down the precipice, which was persuasive and con- 
vincing. 

Each step being full as high as a dinner-table ; there being 
very, very many of the steps ; an Arab having hold of each of 
our arms and springing upward from step to step and snatch- 
ing us with them, forcing us to lift our feet as high as our breasts 
every time, and do it rapidly and keep it up till we were ready 
to faint, who shall say it is not lively, exhilarating, lacerating, 
muscle-straining, bone-wrenching and perfectly excruciating 
and exhausting pastime, climbing the Pyramids? I beseeched 
the varlets not to twist all my joints asunder ; I iterated, reit- 
erated, even swore to them that I did not wish to beat any body 
to the top ; did all I could to convince them that if I got there 




the last of all I would t^el 
blessed above men and 
grateful to them forever ; 
I begged them, prayed 
them, pleaded with them 
to let me stop and rest a 
moment — only one little 
moment: and they only 
answered with some more frightful springs, and an unenlisted 
volunteer behind opened a bombardment of determined boosts 



iiiiiiiiiP'ii 

ASCENT THE PYRAMID. 



THE ASCENT. 623 

with his head which threatened to batter my whole political 
economy to wreck and ruin. 

Twice, for one minute, they let me rest while they extorted 
bucksheesh, and then continued their maniac night up the Pyr- 
amid. They wished to beat the other parties. It was nothing 
to them that I, a stranger, must be sacrificed upon the altar of 
their unholy ambition. But in the midst of sorrow, joy blooms. 
Even in this dark hour I had a sweet consolation. For I knew 
that except these Mohammedans repented they would go 
straight to perdition some day. And they never repent — they 
never forsake their paganism. This thought calmed me, 
cheered me, and I sank down, limp and exhausted, upon the 
summit, but happy, so happy and serene within. 

On the one hand, a mighty sea of yellow sand stretched 
away toward the ends of the earth, solemn, silent, shorn of veg- 
etation, its solitude uncheered by any forms of creature life ; 
©n the other, the Eden of Egypt was spread below us — a broad 
green floor, cloven by the sinuous river, dotted with villages, 
its vast distances measured and marked by the diminishing 
stature of receding clusters of palms. It lay asleep in an en- 
chanted atmosphere. There was no sound, no motion. Above 
the date-plumes in the middle distance, swelled a domed and 
pinnacled mass, glimmering through a tinted, exquisite mist ; 
away toward the horizon a dozen shapely pyramids watched 
over ruined Memphis : and at our feet the bland impassible 
Sphynx looked out upon the picture from her throne in the 
sands as placidly and pensively as she had looked upon its like 
full fifty lagging centuries ago. 

We suffered torture no pen can describe from the hungry ap- 
peals for bucksheesh that gleamed from Arab eyes and poured 
incessantly from Arab lips. Why try to call up the traditions 
of vanished Egyptian grandeur ; why try to fancy Egypt fol- 
lowing dead Rameses to his tomb in the Pyramid, or the long 
multitude of Israel departing over the desert yonder ? Why 
try to think at all ? The thing was impossible. One must 
bring his meditations cut and dried, or else cut and dry them 
afterward. 



624 AN ARAB EXPLOIT. 

The traditional Arab proposed, in the traditional way, to run 
down Cheops, cross the eighth of a mile of sand intervening 
between it and the tall pyramid of Cephron, ascend to Ceph- 
ron's summit and return to us on the top of Cheops — all in 
nine minutes by the watch, and the whole service to be ren- 
dered for a single dollar. In the first flush of irritation, I said 
let the Arab and his exploits go to the mischief. But stay. 
The upper third of Cephron was coated with dressed marble, 
smooth as glass. A blessed thought entered my brain. He 
must infallibly break his neck. Close the contract with dis- 
patch, I said, and let him go. He started. We watched. He 
went bounding down the vast broadside, spring after spring, 
like an ibex. He grew small and smaller till he became a 
bobbing pigmy, away down toward the bottom — then disap- 
peared. We turned and peered over the other side — forty sec- 
onds — eighty seconds — a hundred — happiness, he is dead al- 
ready ! — two minutes — and a quarter — " There he goes !" Too 
true — it was too true. He was very small, now. Gradually, 
but surely, he overcame the level ground. He began to spring 
and climb again. Up, up, up — at last he reached the smootk 
coating — now for it. But he clung to it with toes and fingers, 
like a fly. He crawled this way and that — away to the right, 
slanting upward — away to the left, still slanting upward — and 
stood at last, a black peg on the summit, and waved his pigmy 
scarf ! Then he crept downward to the raw steps again, then 
picked up his agile heels and flew. We lost him presently. 
But presently again we saw him under us, mounting with un- 
diminished energy. Shortly he bounded into our midst with a 
gallant war-whoop. Time, eight minutes, forty-one seconds. 
He had won. His bones were intact. It was a failure. I re- 
flected. I said to myself, he is tired, and must grow dizzy. I 
will risk another dollar on him. 

He started again. Made the trip again. Slipped on the 
smooth coating — I almost had him. But an infamous crevice 
saved him. He was with us once more — perfectly sound 
Time, eight minutes, forty-six seconds. 



AN ARAB EXPLOIT 



625 



I said to Dan, " Lend me a dollar — I can beat this game, yet." 

Worse and worse. He won again. Time, eight minutes, 

forty-eight seconds. I was out of all patience, now. I was 




HiaH HOPES FRUSTRATED. 



desperate. — M o n e y 
was no longer of any 
consequence. I said, 
" Sirrah, I will give 
you a hundred dol- 
lars to jump off this 
pyramid head first. 
If you do not like the terms, name your bet. I scorn to stand 
on expenses now. I will stay right here and risk money on 
you as long as Dan has got a cent." 

I was in a fair way to win, now, for it was a dazzling oppor- 
tunity for an Arab. He pondered a moment, and would have 
done it, I think, but his mother arrived, then, and interfered. 
Her tears moved me — I never can look upon the tears of 
woman with indifference — and I said I would give her a hun- 
dred to jump off, too. 

But it was a failure. The Arabs are too high-priced in 
Egypt. They put on airs unbecoming to such savages. 

40 



626 INSIDE THE PYRAMID. 

We descended, hot and out of humor. The dragoman lit 
candles, and we all entered a hole near the base of the pyra- 
mid, attended by a crazy rabble of Arabs who thrust their ser- 
vices upon us uninvited. They dragged us up a long inclined 
chute, and dripped candle-grease all over us. This chute was 
not more than twice as wide and high as a Saratoga trunk, 
and was walled, roofed and floored with solid blocks of Egyp- 
tian granite as wide as a wardrobe, twice as thick and three 
times as long. ¥e kept on climbing, through the oppressive 
gloom, till I thought we ought to be nearing the top of the pyr- 
amid again, and then came to the " Queen's Chamber," and 
shortly to the Chamber of the King. These large apartments 
were tombs. The walls were built of monstrous masses of 
smoothed granite, neatly joined together. Some of them were 
nearly as large square as an ordinary parlor. A great stone 
sarcophagus like a bath-tub stood in the centre of the King's 
Chamber. Around it were gathered a picturesque group of 
Arab savages and soiled and tattered pilgrims, who held their 
candles aloft in the gloom while they chattered, and the winking 
blurs of light shed a dim glory down upon one of the irrepres- 
sible memento-seekers who was pecking at the venerable sar- 
cophagus with his sacrilegious hammer. 

We struggled out to the open air and the bright sunshine, 
and for the space of thirty minutes received ragged Arabs by 
couples, dozens and platoons, and paid them bucksheesh for 
services they swore and proved by each other that they had 
rendered, but which we had not been aware of before — and as 
each party was paid, they dropped into the rear of the proces- 
sion and in due time arrived again with a newly-invented de- 
linquent list for liquidation. 

We lunched in the shade of the pyramid, and in the midst 
ol this encroaching and unwelcome company, and then Dan 
and Jack and I started away for a walk. A howling swarm of 
beggars followed us — surrounded us — almost headed us off. A 
sheik, in flowing white bournous and gaudy head-gear, was 
with them. He wanted more bucksheesh. But we had adopted 
a new code — it was millions for defense, but not a cent for 



STRATEGY. 



627 



bucksheesh. I asked him if he could persuade the others to de- 
part if we paid him. He said yes — for ten francs. We ac- 
cepted the contract, and said — 

u Now persuade your vassals to fall back." 

He swung his long staff round his head and three Arabs 
bit the dust. He capered among the mob like a very maniac. 
His blows fell like hail, and wherever one fell a subject 
went down. "We had to hurry to the rescue and tell him 
it was only 
necessary to 
damage them a 
little, he need 
not kill them. — 
In two minutes 
we were alone 
with the sheik, 
and remained 
so. The per- 
suasive powers 
of this illiter- 




A POWERFUL ARGUMENT. 



ate savage 
were remark- 
able. 

Each side of the Pyramid of Cheops is about as long as the 
Capitol at Washington, or the Sultan's new palace on the Bos- 
porus, and is longer than the greatest depth of St. Peter's at 
Pome — which is to say that each side of Cheops extends seven 
hundred and some odd feet. It is about seventy-five feet 
higher than the cross on St. Peter's. The first time I ever 
went down the Mississippi, I thought the highest bluff on the 
river between St. Louis and New Orleans — it was near Selma, 
Missouri — was probably the highest mountain in the world. 
It is four hundred and thirteen feet high. It still looms in my 
memory with undiminished grandeur. I can still see the trees 
and bushes growing smaller and smaller as I followed them up 
its huge slant with my eye, till they became a feathery fringe 
on the distant summit. This symmetrical Pyramid of Cheops 



628 YOUTHFUL REMINISCENCES. 

—this solid mountain of stone reared by the patient hands of 
men — this mighty tomb of a forgotten monarch — dwarfs my 
cherished mountain. For it is four hundred and eighty feet 
high. In still earlier years than those I have been recalling, 
Holliday's Hill, in our town, was to me the noblest work of 
God. It appeared to pierce the skies. It was nearly three 
hundred feet high. In those days I pondered the subject 
much, but I never could understand why it did not swathe its 
summit with never-failing clouds, and crown its majestic brow 
with everlasting snows. I had heard that such was the custom 
of great mountains in other parts of the world. I remembered 
how I worked with another boy, at odd afternoons stolen from 
study and paid for with stripes, to undermine and start from its 
bed an immense boulder that rested upon the edge of that hill- 
top ; I remembered how, one Saturday afternoon, we gave 
three hours of honest effort to the task, and saw at last that out 
reward was at hand ; I remembered how we sat down, then, and 
wiped the perspiration away, and waited to let a picnic party 
get out of the way in the road below — and then we started the 
boulder. It was splendid. It went crashing down the hill- 
side, tearing up saplings, mowing bushes down like grass, 
ripping and crushing and smashing every thing in its path — 
eternally splintered and scattered a wood pile at the foot of the 
hill, and then sprang from the high bank clear over a dray in 
the road — the negro glanced up once and dodged — and the next 
second it made infinitesimal mince-meat of a frame cooper-shop, 
and the coopers swarmed out like bees. Then we said it was 
perfectly magnificent, and left. Because the coopers were 
starting up the hill to inquire. 

Still, that mountain, prodigious as it was, was nothing to the 
Pyramid of Cheops. I could conjure up no comparison that 
would convey to my mind a satisfactory comprehension of the 
magnitude of a pile of monstrous stones that covered thirteen 
acres of ground and stretched upward four hundred and eighty 
tiresome feet, and so I gave it up and walked down to the 
Sphynx. 

After years of waiting, it was before me at last. The great 



THE MAJESTIC SPHINX. 629 

face was so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was 
a dignity not of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a be- 
nignity such as neyer any thing human wore. It was stone, 
but it seemed sentient. If ever image of stone thought, it was 
thinking. It was looking toward the verge of the landscape, 
yet looking at nothing — nothing but distance and vacancy. It 
was looking over and beyond every thing of the present, and 
far into the past. It was gazing out over the ocean of Time — 
over lines of century-waves which, further and . further reced- 
ing, closed nearer and nearer together, and blended at last into 
one unbroken tide, away toward the horizon of remote anti- 
quity. It was thinking of the wars of departed ages ; of the 
empires it had seen created and destroyed; of the nations 
whose birth it had witnessed, whose progress it had watched, 
whose annihilation it had noted ; of the joy and sorrow, the 
life and death, the grandeur and decay, of Rye thousand slow 
revolving years. It was the type of an attribute of man — of a 
faculty of his heart and brain. It was Memory — Retrospec- 
tion — wrought into visible, tangible form. All who know 
what pathos there is in memories of days that are accomplished 
and faces that have vanished — albeit only a trifling score of 
years gone by — will have some appreciation of the pathos that 
dwells in .these grave eyes that look so steadfastly back upon 
the things they knew before History was born — before Tradi- 
tion had being — things that were, and forms that moved, in a 
vague era which even Poetry and Romance scarce know of — and 
passed one by one away and left the stony dreamer solitary in 
the midst of a strange new age, and uncomprehended scenes. , 

The Sphynx is grand in its loneliness ; it is imposing in its 
magnitude ; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its 
story. And there is that in the overshadowing majesty of this 
eternal figure of stone, with its accusing memory of the deeds 
of all ages, which reveals to one something of what he shall 
feel when he shall stand at last in the awful presence of God. 

There are some things which, for the credit of America, 
should be left unsaid, perhaps ; but these very things happen 
sometimes to be the very things which, for the real benefit of 



630 



THE MAJESTIC SPHYNX. 



Americans, ought to have prominent notice. While we stood 
looking, a wart, or an excrescence of some kind, appeared on the 
jaw of the Sphynx. "We heard the familiar clink of a hammer, 

and understood 
the case at once. 
One of our well- 
meaning reptiles 
— I mean relic- 
hunters — had 
crawled up there 
and was trying to 
break a " speci- 
men " from the 
face of this the 
most majestic cre- 
ation the hand of 
man has wrought. 
But the great im- 
age contemplated 
the dead ages as 
the relic-hunter. calmly as ever, 

unconscious of 
the small insect that was fretting at its jaw. Egyptian granite 
that has defied the storms and earthquakes of all time has 
nothing to fear from the tack-hammers of ignorant excursion- 
ists — highwaymen like this specimen. He failed in his en- 
terprise. We sent a sheik to arrest him if he had the 
authority, or to warn him, if he had not, that by the laws of 
Egypt the crime he was attempting to commit was punishable 
with imprisonment or the bastinado. Then he desisted and 
went away. 

The Sphynx : a hundred and twenty-five feet long, sixty feet 
high, and a hundred and two feet around the head, if I remember 
rightly — carved out of one solid block of stone harder than any 
iron. The block must have been as large as the Fifth Avenue 
Hotel before the usual waste (by the necessities of sculpture) of a 
fourth or a half of the original mass was begun. I only set 




THINGS I SHALL NOT TELL. 



631 



down these figures and these remarks to suggest the prodigious 
labor the carving of it so elegantly, so symmetrically, so fault- 
lessly, must have cost. This species of stone is so hard that fig- 
ures cut in it remain sharp and unmarred after exposure to the 
weather for two or three thousand years. Now did it take a 
hundred years of patient toil to carve the Sphynx ? It seems 
probable. 

Something interfered, and we did not visit the Red Sea and 
walk upon the sands of Arabia. I shall not describe the great 
mosque of Mehemet Ali, whose entire inner walls are built of 
polished and glistening alabaster ; I shall not tell how the lit- 
tle birds have built their nests in the globes of the great chan- 
deliers that hang in the 

mosque, and how they fill 
the whole place with their 
music and are not afraid 
of any body because their 
audacity is pardoned, their 
rights are respected, and 
nobody is allowed to inter- 
fere with them, even 
though the mosque be thus 
doomed to go unlighted ; I 
certainly shall not tell the 
hackneyed story of the 
massacre of the Mame- 
lukes, because I am glad 
the lawless rascals were 
massacred, and I do not 
wish to get up any sympa- 
thy in their behalf; I shall 

, , ,, , ,, , ,. THE MAMELUKE'S LEAP. 

not tell how that one soli- 
tary Mameluke jumped his horse a hundred feet down from 
the battlements of the citadel and escaped, because I do 
not think much of that— I could have done it myself; I shall 
not tell of Joseph's well which he dug in the solid rock of the 
citadel hill and which is still as good as new, nor how the 




632 THINGS I SHALL NOT TELL. 

same mules he bought to draw up the water (with an endless 
chain) are still at it yet and are getting tired of it, too ; I shall 
not tell about Joseph's granaries which he built to store the 
grain in, what time the Egyptian brokers were " selling short," 
unwitting that there would be no corn in all the land when 
it should be time for them to deliver ; I shall not tell any thing 
about the strange, strange city of Cairo, because it is only a re- 
petition, a good deal intensified and exaggerated, of the Orien- 
tal cities I have already spoken of; I shall not tell of the Great 
Caravan which leaves for Mecca every year, for I did not see 
it; nor of the fashion the people have of prostrating them- 
selves and so forming a long human pavement to be ridden 
over by the chief of the expedition on its return, to the end 
that their salvation may be thus secured, for I did not see that 
either ; I shall not speak of the railway, for it is like any other 
railway — I shall only say that the fuel they use for the loco- 
motive is composed of mummies three thousand years old, pur- 
chased by the ton or by the graveyard for that purpose, and 
that sometimes one hears the profane engineer call out pettish- 
ly, "D — n these plebeians, they don't burn worth a cent — pass 
out a King ;"* I shall not tell of the groups of mud cones 
stuck like wasps' nests upon a thousand mounds above high 
water-mark the length and breadth of Egypt — villages of the 
lower classes ; I shall not speak of the boundless sweep of level 
plain, green with luxuriant grain, that gladdens the eye as far 
as it can pierce through the soft, rich atmosphere of Egypt ; I 
shall not speak of the vision of the Pyramids seen at a distance 
of five and twenty miles, for the picture is too ethereal to be 
limned by an uninspired pen ; I shall not tell of the crowds of 
dusky women who flocked to the cars when they stopped a 
moment at a station, to sell us a drink of water or a ruddy, 
juicy pomegranate ; I shall not tell of the motley multitudes 
and wild costumes that graced a fair we found in full blast at 
another barbarous station ; I shall not tell how we feasted on 
fresh dates and enjoyed the pleasant landscape all through the 

* Stated to me for a fact. I only tell it as I got it. I am willing to belieye it 
I can believe any thing. 



GRAND OLD EGYPT. 



633 



flying journey ; nor how we thundered into Alexandria, at 
last, swarmed out of the cars, rowed aboard the ship, left a 
comrade behind, (who was to return to Europe, thence home,) 
raised the anchor, and turned our bows homeward finally and 
forever from the long voyage ; nor how, as the mellow sun went 
down upon the oldest land on earth, Jack and Moult assem- 
bled in solemn state in the smoking-room and mourned over 
the lost comrade the whole night long, and would not be com- 
forted. I shall not speak a word of any of these things, or write 
a line. They shall be as a sealed book. I do not know what a 
sealed book is, because I never saw one, but a sealed book is the 
expression to use in this connection, because it is popular. 

We were glad to have seen the land which was the mother 
of civilization — which taught Greece her letters, and through 

Greece Rome, and through 
Rome the world ; the land 
which could have human- 
ized and civilized the hap- 
less children of Israel, but 
allowed them to depart out 
of her borders little better 
than savages. We were glad 
to have seen that land which 
had an enlightened religion 
with future eternal rewards 
and punishment in it, while 
even Israel's religion con- 
tained no promise of a here- 
after. We were glad to have 
seen that land which had 
glass three thousand years before Eng~ 
land had it, and could paint upon it as 
none of us can paint now ; that land 
which knew, three thousand years 
ago, well nigh all of medicine and 
surgery which science has discovered lately; which had all 
those curious surgical instruments which science has invented 




WOULD NOT BE COMFORTED. 



634 



GRAND OLD EGYPT. 



recently ; which had in high excellence a thousand luxuries 
and necessities of an advanced civilization which we have 
gradually contrived and accumulated in modern times and 
claimed as things that were new under the sun; that had 
paper untold centuries before we dreampt of it — and water- 
falls before our women thought of them ; that had a perfect 
system of common schools so long before we boasted of our 
achievements in that direction that it seems forever and forever 



ago 



that so embalmed the dead that flesh was made almost im- 



mortal — which we can not do ; that built temples which mock 
at destroying time and smile grimly upon our lauded little pro- 
digies of architecture ; that old land that knew all which we 
know now, perchance, and more ; that walked in the broad 
highway of civilization in the gray dawn of creation, ages and 
ages before we were born ; that left the impress of exalted, cul- 
tivated Mind upon the eternal front of the Sphynx to confound 
all scoffers who, when all her other proofs had passed away, 
might seek to persuade the world that imperial Egypt, in the 
days of her high renown, had groped in darkness. 




OHAPTEE LIX. 



~YTT"E were at sea now, for a very long voyage — we were to 

V V pass through, the entire length of the Levant ; through 

the entire length of the Mediterranean proper, also, and then 

cross the full width of the Atlantic — a voyage of several weeks. 




HOMEWARD BOUND. 



We naturally settled down into a very slow, stay-at-home man- 
ner of life, and resolved to be quiet, exemplary people, and 
roam no more for twenty or thirty days. No more, at least, 
than from stem to stern of the ship. It was a very comfort- 
able prospect, though, for we were tired and needed a long 
rest. 



636 NOTE-BOOKS AT SEA. 

"We were all lazy and satisfied, now, as the meager entries 
in my note-book (that sure index, to me, of my condition,) 
prove. What a stupid thing a note-book gets to be at sea, any 
way. Please observe the style : 

" Sunday — Services, as usual, at four bells. Services at night, also. No cards. 

"Monday — Beautiful day, but rained hard. The cattle purchased at Alexandria 
for beef ought to be shingled. Or else fattened. The water stands in deep pud- 
dles in the depressions forward of their after shoulders. Also here and there all 
over their backs. It is well they are not cows — it would soak in and ruin the 
milk. The poor devil eagle* from Syria looks miserable and droopy in the rain, 
perched on the forward capstan. He appears to have his own opinion of a sea 
voyage, and if it were put into language and the language solidified, it would prob- 
ably essentially dam the widest river in the world. 

" Tuesday — Somewhere in the neighborhood of the island of Malta, Can not stop 
there. Cholera. Weather very stormy. Many passengers seasick and invisible. 

" Wednesday — Weather still very savage. Storm blew two land birds to sea. and 
they came on board. A hawk was blown off, also. He circled round and round 
the ship, wanting to light, but afraid of the people. He was so tired, though, that 
he had to light, at last, or perish. He stopped in the foretop, repeatedly, and was 
as often blown away by the wind. At last Harry caught him. Sea full of flying- 
fish. They rise in flocks of three hundred and flash along above the tops of the 
waves a distance of two or three hundred feet, then fall and disappear. 

" Thursday — Anchored off Algiers, Africa. Beautiful city, beautiful green hilly 
landscape behind it. Staid half a day and left. Not permitted to land, though we 
showed a clean bill of health. They were afraid of Egyptian plague and cholera. 

"Friday — Morning, dominoes. Afternoon, dominoes. Evening, promenading 
the deck. Afterwards, charades. 

" Saturday — Morning, dominoes. Afternoon, dominoes. Evening, promenading 
the decks. Afterwards, dominoes. 

" Sunday — Morning service, four bells. Evening service, eight bells. Monotony 
till midnight. — Whereupon, dominoes. 

"Monday — Morning, dominoes. Afternoon, dominoes. Evening, promenading 
the decks. Afterward, charades and a lecture from Dr. C. Dominoes. 

" Xo date — Anchored off the picturesque city of Cagliari, Sardinia. Staid till 
midnight, but not permitted to land by these infamous foreigners. They smell in- 
odorously — they do not wash — they dare not risk cholera. 

" Thursday — Anchored off the beautiful cathedral city of Malaga, Spain. — Went 
ashore in the captain's boat — not ashore, either, for they would not let us land. 
Quarantine. Shipped my newspaper correspondence, which they took with tongs, 
dipped it in sea water, clipped it full of holes, and then fumigated it with vil- 
lainous vapors till it smelt like a Spaniard. Inquired about chances to run the 
blockade and visit the Alhambra at Granada. Too risky— they might hang a 
body. Set sail — middle of afternoon. 

* Afterwards presented to the Central Park. 



a boy's diary. 637 

" And so on, and so on, and so forth, for several days. Finally, anchored off 
Gibraltar, which looks familiar and home-like." 

It reminds me of the journal I opened with the New Year, 
once, when I was a boy and a confiding and a willing prey to 
those impossible schemes of reform which well-meaning old 
maids and grandmothers set for the feet of unwary youths at 
that season of the year — setting oversized tasks for them, 
which, necessarily failing, as infallibly weaken the boy's 
strength of will, diminish his confidence in himself and injure 
his chances of success in life. Please accept of an extract : 

11 Monday — Got up, washed, went to bed. 

" Tuesday — Got up, washed, went to bed. 

" Wednesday — Got up, washed, went to bed. 

" Thursday — Got up, washed, went to bed. 

" Friday — Got up, washed, went to bed. 

" Next Friday — Got up, washed, went to bed. 

" Friday fortnight — Got up, washed, went to bed. 

" Following month — Got up, washed, went to bed." 

I stopped, then, discouraged. Startling events appeared to 
be too rare, in my career, to render a diary necessary. I still 
reflect with pride, however, that even at that early age I 
washed when I got up. That journal finished me. I never 
have had the nerve to keep one since. My loss of confidence 
in myself in that line was permanent. 

The ship had to stay a week or more at Gibraltar to take in 
coal for the home voyage. 

It would be very tiresome staying here, and so four of us 
ran the quarantine blockade and spent seven delightful days 
in Seville, Cordova, Cadiz, and wandering through the pleas- 
ant rural scenery of Andalusia, the garden of Old Spain. 
The experiences of that cheery week were too varied and nu- 
merous for a short chapter and I have not room for a long one. 
Therefore I shall leave them all out. 



CHAPTER LX 

TEN or eleven o'clock found ns coming down to breakfast 
one morning in Cadiz. They told us the ship had been 
lying at anchor in the harbor two or three hours. It was time 
for us to bestir ourselves. The ship could wait only a little 
while because of the quarantine. We were soon on board, and 
within the hour the white city and the pleasant shores of Spain 
sank down behind the waves and passed out of sight. We had 
seen no land fade from view so regretfully. 

It had long ago been decided in a noisy public meeting in 
the main cabin that we could not go to Lisbon, because we 
must surely be quarantined there. We did every thing by 
mass-meeting, in the good old national way, from swapping off 
one empire for another on the programme of the voyage down 
to complaining of the cookery and the scarcity of napkins. I 
am reminded, now, of one of these complaints of the cookery 
made by a passenger. The coffee had been steadily growing 
more and more execrable for the space of three weeks, till at 
last it had ceased to be coffee altogether and had assumed the 
nature of mere discolored water — so this person said. He said 
it was so weak that it was transparent an inch in depth around 
the edge of the cup. As he approached the table one morning 
he saw the transparent edge — by means of his extraordinary 
vision — long before he got to his seat. He went back and 
complained in a high-handed way to Capt. Duncan. He said 
the coffee was disgraceful. The Captain showed his. It seemed 
tolerably good. The incipient mutineer was more outraged 
than ever, then, at what he denounced as the partiality shown 



GLIMPSE OF MADEIEA, 



639 



the captain's table over the other tables in the ship. He 
flourished back and got his cup and set it down triumphantly, 
and said : 

" Just try that mixture once, Captain Duncan." 

He smelt it — tasted it — smiled benignantly — then said : 

" It is inferior — for coffee — but it is pretty fair teaP 

The humbled 
mutineer smelt 
it, tasted it, and 
returned to his 
seat. He had 
made an egre- 
gious ass of him- 
self before the 
whole ship. He 
did it no more. 
After that he 
took things as 
they came. That 
was me. 

The old-fash- 
ioned ship-life 
had returned, now that we were no longer in sight of land. For 
days and days it continued just the same, one day being ex- 
actly like another, and, to me, every one of them pleasant. 
At last we anchored in the open roadstead of Funchal, in the 
beautiful islands we call the Madeiras. 

The mountains looked surpassingly lovely, clad as they were 
in living green ; ribbed with lava ridges ; flecked with white 
cottages ; riven by deep chasms purple with shade ; the great 
slopes dashed with sunshine and mottled with shadows flung 
from the drifting squadrons of the sky, and the superb picture 
fitly crowned by towering peaks whose fronts were swept by 
the trailing fringes of the clouds. 

But we could not land. We staid all day and looked, we 
abused the man who invented quarantine, we held half a dozen 
mass-meetings and crammed them full of interrupted speeches. 




COFFEE. 



640 



THE PLEASANT BERMUDAS. 



motions that fell still-born, amendments that came to nought 
and resolutions that died from sheer exhaustion in trying to 
get before the house. At night we set sail. 

"We averaged four mass-meetings a week for the voyage — 
we seemed always in labor in this way, and yet so often falla- 
ciously that whenever at long intervals we were safely deliv- 
ered of a resolution, it was cause for public rejoicing, and we 
hoisted the flag and fired a salute. 

Days passed — and nights ; and then the beautiful Bermudas 




OUR FRIENDS, THE BERMUDIANS. 



rose out of the sea, we entered the tortuous channel, steamed 
hither and thither among the bright summer islands, and rested 
at last under the flag of England and were welcome. We were 
not a nightmare here, where were civilization and intelligence 
in place of Spanish and Italian superstition, dirt and dread of 
cholera. A few days among the breezy groves, the flower gar- 



OUR FIRST ACCIDENT. 



641 



dens, the coral caves, and the lovely vistas of blue water that 
went curving in and out, disappearing and anon again appear- 
ing through jungle walls of brilliant foliage, restored the ener- 
gies dulled by long drowsing on the ocean, and fitted us for our 
final cruise — our little run of a thousand miles to New York 
— America — home. 

We bade good-bye to " our friends the Bermudians," as our 
programme hath it — the majority of those we were most inti- 
mate with were negroes — and courted the great deep again. 
I said the majority. We knew more negroes than white peo- 
ple, because we had a deal of washing to be done, but we made 
some most excellent friends among the whites, whom it will be 
a pleasant duty to hold long in grateful remembrance. 

We sailed, and from that hour all idling ceased. Such an- 
other system of overhauling, general littering of cabins and 
packing of trunks we 
had not seen since we 
let go the anchor in the 
harbor of Beirout. Ev- 
ery body was busy . Lists 
of all purchases had to 
be made out, and values 
attached, to facilitate 
matters at the custom- 
house. Purchases bought 
by bulk in partnership 
had to be equitably di- 
vided, outstanding debts 
canceled, accounts com- 
pared, and trunks, boxes 
and packages labeled. 
All day long the bustle 
and confusion continued. 

And now came our first accident. A passenger was running 
through a gangway, between decks, one stormy night, when 
he caught his foot in the iron staple of a door that had been 
heedlessly left off a hatchway, and the bones of his leg broke 

41 




CAPT. DUNCAN. 



642 AT HOME. 

at the ancle. It was our first serious misfortune. We had 
traveled much more than twenty thousand miles, by land and 
sea, in many trying climates, without a single hurt, without a 
serious case of sickness and without a death among five and 
sixty passengers. Our good fortune had been wonderful. A 
sailor had jumped overboard at Constantinople one night, and 
was seen no more, but it was suspected that his object was to 
desert, and there was a slim chance, at least, that he reached 
the shore. But the passenger list was complete. There was 
no name missing from the register. 

At last, one pleasant morning, we steamed up the harbor 
of New York, all on deck, all dressed in Christian garb — by 
special order, for there was a latent disposition in some quar- 
ters to come out as Turks — and amid a waving of handker- 
chiefs from welcoming friends, the glad pilgrims noted the 
shiver of the decks that told that ship and pier had joined 
hands again and the long, strange cruise was over. Amen, 



OHAPTEE LXI. 

T!N" this place I will print an article which I wrote for the 
-L New York Herald the night we arrived. I do it partly 
because my contract with my publishers makes it compulsory ; 
partly because it is a proper, tolerably accurate, and exhaust- 
ive summing up of the cruise of the ship and the performances 
of the pilgrims in foreign lands ; and partly because some of 
the passengers have abused me for writing it, and I wish the 
public to see how thankless a task it is to put one's self to trouble 
to glorify un appreciative people. I was charged with "rush- 
ing into print " with these compliments. I did not rush. I 
had written news letters to the Herald sometimes, but yet when 
I visited the office that day I did not say any thing about 
writing a valedictory. I did go to the Tribune office to see if 
such an article was wanted, because I belonged on the regular 
staff of that paper and it was simply a duty to do it. The 
managing editor was absent, and so I thought no more about 
it. At night when the Herald's request came for an article, I 
did not " rush." In fact, I demurred for a while, because I 
did not feel like writing compliments then, and therefore was 
afraid to speak of the cruise lest I might be betrayed into 
using other than complimentary language. However, I re- 
flected that it would be a just and righteous thing to go down 
and write a kind word for the Hadjis — Hadjis are people who 
have made the pilgrimage — because parties not interested 
could not do it so feelingly as I, a fellow-Hadji, and so I penned 
the valedictory. I have read it, and read it again ; and if 
there is a sentence in it that is not fulsomely complimentary to 



644 AN OBITUARY. 

captain, ship and passengers, /can not find it. If it ia not a 
chapter that any company might be proud to have a body 
write about them, my judgment is fit for nothing. With these 
remarks I confidently submit it to the unprejudiced judgment 
of the reader : 



RETURN OF THE HOLY LAND EXCURSIONISTS THE STORY OF THE 

CRUISE. 

To the Editor of the Herald: 

The steamer Quaker City has accomplished at last her extraordinary voyage 
and returned to her old pier at the foot of Wall street. The expedition was a suc- 
cess in some respects, in some it was not. Originally it was advertised as a "pleas- 
ure excursion." "Well perhaps, it was a pleasure excursion, but certainly it did 
not look like one ; certainly it did not act like one. Any body's and every body's 
notion of a pleasure excursion is that the parties to it will of a necessity be young 
and giddy and somewhat boisterous. They will dance a good deal, sing a good 
deal, make love, but sermonize very little. Any body's and every body's notion of 
a well conducted funeral is that there must be a hearse and a corpse, and chief 
mourners and mourners by courtesy, many old people, much solemnity, no levity, 
and a prayer and a sermon withal. Three-fourths of the Quaker City's passengers 
were between forty and seventy years of age ! There was a picnic crowd for you I 
It may be supposed that the other fourth was composed of young girls. But it 
was not. It was chiefly composed of rusty old bachelors and a child of six years. 
Let us average the ages of the Quaker City's pilgrims and set the figure down as 
fifty years. Is any man insane enough to imagine that this picnic of patriarchs 
sang, made love, danced, laughed, told anecdotes, dealt in ungodly levity ? In my 
experience they sinned little in these matters. No doubt it was presumed here at 
home that these frolicsome veterans laughed and sang and romped all day, and day 
after day, and kept up a noisy excitement from one end of the ship to the other; 
and that they played blind-man's buff or danced quadrilles and waltzes on moon- 
light evenings on the quarter-deck ; and that at odd moments of unoccupied time 
they jotted a laconic item or two in the journals they opened on such an elaborate 
plan when they left home, and then skurried off to their whist and euchre labors 
under the cabin lamps. If these things were presumed, the presumption was at 
fault. The venerable excursionists were not gay and frisky. They played no 
^blind-man's buff ; they dealt not in whist ; they shirked not the irksome journal, 
for alas ! most of them were even writing books. They never romped, they talked 
but little, they never sang, save in the nightly prayer-meeting. The pleasure ship 
was a synagogue, and the pleasure trip was a funeral excursion without a corpse. 
(There is nothing exhilarating about a funeral excursion without a corpse.) A free, 
hearty laugh was a sound that was not heard oftener than once in seven days about 
those decks or in those cabins, and when it was heard it met with precious little 
sympathy. The excursionists danced, on three separate evenings, long, long ago, 



AN OBITUARY. 645> 

(it seems an age,) quadrilles, of a single set, made up of three ladies and five gen- 
tlemen, (the latter with handkerchiefs around their arms to signify their sex,) who 
timed their feet to the solemn wheezing of a melodeon ; but even this melancholy 
orgie was voted to be sinful, and dancing was discontinued. 

The pilgrims played dominoes when too much Josephus or Robinson's Holy 
Land Researches, or book-writing, made recreation necessary — for dominoes is 
about as mild and sinless a game as any in the world, perhaps, excepting always 
the ineffably insipid diversion they call croquet, which is a game where you don't 
pocket any balls and don't carom on any thing of any consequence, and when you 
are done nobody has to pay, and there are no refreshments to saw off, and, conse- 
quently, there isn't any satisfaction whatever about it — they played dominoes till 
they were rested, and then they blackguarded each other privately till prayer-time. 
"When they were not seasick they were uncommonly prompt when the dinner-gong; 
sounded. Such was our daily life on board the ship— solemnity, decorum, dinner,, 
dominoes, devotions, slander. It was not lively enough for a pleasure trip ; but if 
we had only had a corpse it would have made a noble funeral excursion. It is all 
over now ; but when I look back, the idea of these venerable fossils skipping forth 
on a six months' picnic, seems exquisitely refreshing. The advertised title of tha 
expedition — "The Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion" — was a misnomer, 
"The Grand Holy Land Funeral Procession" would have been better — much 
better. 

Wherever we went, in Europe, Asia, or Africa, we made a sensation, and, I sup- 
pose I may add, created a famine. None of us had ever been any where before ; 
we all hailed from the interior ; travel was a wild novelty to us, and we conducted 
ourselves in accordance with the natural instincts that were in us, and trammeled 
ourselves with no ceremonies, no conventionalities. "We always took care to make 
it understood that we were Americans — Americans ! When we found that a good- 
many foreigners had hardly ever heard of America, and that a good many more 
knew it only as a barbarous province away off somewhere, that had lately been at 
war with somebody, we pitied the ignorance of the Old World, but abated no jot 
of our importance. Many and many a simple community in the Eastern hemisphere 
will remember for years the incursion of the strange horde in the year of our Lord 
1867, that called themselves Americans, and seemed to imagine in some unaccount- 
able way that they had a right to be proud of it. We generally created a famine, 
partly because the coffee on the Quaker City was unendurable, and sometimes the 
more substantial fare was not strictly first class ; and partly because one naturally 
tires of sitting long at the same board and eating from the same dishes. 

The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked cu- 
riously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed 
that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for 
expenses, and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where 
in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and 
stared when we spoke to them in French ! We never did succeed in making those 
idiots understand their own language. One of our passengers said to a shopkeeper, 
in reference to a proposed return to buy a pair of gloves, " Allong restay trankeel — 
may be ve coom Moonday ;" and would you believe it, that shopkeeper, a born 



64:6 AN OBITUARY. 

Frenchman, had to ask what it was that had been said. Sometimes it seems to mev 
somehow, that there must be a difference between Parisian French and Quaker 
City French. 

The people stared at us every where, and we stared at them. We generally 
made them feel rather small, too, before we got done with them, because we bore 
down on them with America's greatness until we crushed them. And yet we took 
kindly to the manners and customs, and especially to the fashions of the various 
people we visited. When we left the Azores, we wore awful capotes and used 
fine tooth combs — successfully. When we came back from Tangier, in Africa, we 
were topped with fezzes of the bloodiest hue, hung with tassels like an Indian's 
scalp-lock. In France and Spain we attracted some attention in these costumes. 
In Italy they naturally took us for distempered Garibaldians, and set a gunboat to 
look for any thing significant in our changes of uniform. We made Rome howl. 
We could have made any place howl when we had all our clothes on. We got no 
fresh raiment in Greece — they had but little there of any kind. But at Constanti- 
nople, how we turned out ! Turbans, scimetars, fezzes, horse-pistols, tunics, sashes, 
baggy trowsers, yellow slippers — Oh, we were gorgeous ! The illustrious dogs of 
Constantinople barked their under jaws off, and even then failed to do us justice. 
They are all dead by this time. They could not go through such a run of business 
as we gave them and survive. 

And then we went to see the Emperor of Russia. We just called on him as 
comfortably as if we had known him a century or so, and when we had finished 
our visit we variegated ourselves with selections from Russian costumes and sailed 
away again more picturesque than ever. In Smyrna we picked up camel's hair 
shawls and other dressy things from Persia ; but in Palestine — ah, in Palestine — 
our splendid career ended. They didn't wear any clothes there to speak of. We 
were satisfied, and stopped. We made no experiments. We did not try their cos- 
tume. But we astonished the natives of that country. We astonished them with 
such eccentricities of dress as we could muster. We prowled through the Holy 
Land, from Cesarea Philippi to Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, a weird procession of 
pilgrims, gotten uo ree-ardless o f expense, solemn, gorgeous, green-spectacled, 
drowsing under blue umbrellas, and astride of a sorrier lot of horses, camels and 
asses than those that came out of Noah's ark, after eleven months of seasickness 
and short rations. If ever those children of Israel in Palestine forget when Gid- 
eon's Band went through there from America, they ought to be cursed once more 
and finished. It was the rarest spectacle that ever astounded mortal eyes, perhaps. 

Well, we were at home in Palestine. It was easy to see that that was the grand 
feature of the expedition. We had cared nothing much about Europe. We gal- 
loped through the Louvre, the Pitti, the Ufizzi, the Vatican — all the galleries — and 
through the pictured and frescoed churches of Yenice, Naples, and the cathedrals 
of Spain ; some of us said that certain of the great works of the old masters were 
glorious creations of genius, (we found it out in the guide-book, though we got hold 
of the wrong picture sometimes,) and the others said they were disgraceful old 
daubs. We examined modern and ancient statuary with a critical eye in Florence^ 
Rome, or any where we found it, and praised it if we saw fit, and if we didn't we 
said we preferred the wooden Indians in front of the cigar stores of America. But 



AN OBITUARY. 647 

the Holy Land brought out all our enthusiasm. "We fell into raptures by the bar- 
ren shores of Galilee ; we pondered at Tabor and at Nazareth ; we exploded into 
poetry over the questionable loveliness of Esdraelon; we meditated at Jezreel and 
Samaria over the missionary zeal of Jehu ; we rioted — fairly rioted among the holy 
places of Jerusalem ; we bathed in Jordan and the Dead Sea, reckless whether our 
accident-insurance policies were extra-hazardous or not, and brought away so 
many jugs of precious water from both places that all the country from Jericho to 
the mountains of Moab will suffer from drouth this year, I think. Yet, the pil- 
grimage part of the excursion was its pet feature — there is no question about that. 
After dismal, smileless Palestine, beautiful Egypt had few charms for us. "We 
merely glanced at it and were ready for home. 

They wouldn't let us land at Malta — quarantine ; they would not let us land in 
Sardinia ; nor at Algiers, Africa ; nor at Malaga, Spain, nor Cadiz, nor at the Ma- 
deira islands. So we got offended at all foreigners and turned our backs upon them 
and came home. I suppose we only stopped at the Bermudas because they were 
in the programme. "We did not care any thing about any place at all. "We 
wanted to go home. Homesickness was abroad in the ship — it was epidemic. If 
the authorities of New York had known how badly we had it, they would have 
quarantined us here. 

The grand pilgrimage is over. Good-bye to it, and a pleasant memory to it, I 
am able to say in all kindness. I bear no malice, no ill-will toward any individ- 
ual that was connected with it, either as passenger or officer. Things I did not 
like at all yesterday I like very well to-day, now that I am at home, and always 
hereafter I shall be able to poke fun at the whole gang if the spirit so moves me to 
do, without ever saying a malicious word. The expedition accomplished all that 
its programme promised that it should accomplish, and we ought all to be satisfied 
with the management of the matter, certainly. Bye-bye ! 

Mark Twain. 

I call that complimentary. It is complimentary ; and yet I 
never have received a word of thanks for it from the Hadjis ; 
on the contrary I speak nothing but the serious truth when I 
say that many of them even took exceptions to the article. In 
endeavoring to please them I slaved over that sketch for two 
hours, and had my labor for my pains. I never will do a gen- 
erous deed again. 



CONCLUSION. 

NEARLY one year has flown since this notable pilgrimage 
was ended ; and as I sit here at home in San Francisco 
thinking, I am moved to confess that day by day the mass of 
my memories of the excursion have grown more and more 
pleasant as the disagreeable incidents of travel which encum- 
bered them flitted one by one out of my mind — and now, if 
the Quaker City were weighing her anchor to sail away on the 
very same cruise again, nothing could gratify me more than to 
be a passenger. With the same captain and even the same 
pilgrims, the same sinners. I was on excellent terms with 
eight or nine of the excursionists (they are my staunch friends 
yet,) and was even on speaking terms with the rest of the 
sixty-five. I have been at sea quite enough to know that that 
was a very good average. Because a long sea-voyage not only 
brings out all the mean traits one has, and exaggerates them, 
but raises up others which he never suspected he possessed, and 
even creates new ones. A twelve months' voyage at sea would 
make of an ordinary man a very miracle of meanness. On the 
other hand, if a man has good qualities, the spirit seldom moves 
him to exhibit them on shipboard, at least with any sort of em- 
phasis. Now I am satisfied that our pilgrims are pleasant old 
people on shore ; I am also satisfied that at sea on a second 
voyage they would be pleasanter, somewhat, than they were on 
our grand excursion, and so I say without hesitation that I 
would be glad enough to sail with them again. I could at least 
enjoy life with my handful of old friends. They could enjoy 
life with their cliques as well — passengers invariably divide up 
into cliques, on all ships. 



CONCLUSION. 649 

And I will say, here, that I would rather travel with an ex- 
cursion party of Methuselahs than have to be changing ships 
and comrades constantly, as people do who travel in the ordi- 
nary way. Those latter are always grieving over some other 
ship they have known and lost, and over other comrades whom 
diverging routes have separated from them. They learn to 
love a ship just in time to change it for another, and they be- 
some attached to a pleasant traveling companion only to lose 
him. They have that most dismal experience of being in a 
strange vessel, among strange people who care nothing about 
them, and of undergoing the customary bullying by strange 
officers and the insolence of strange servants, repeated over 
and over again within the compass of every month. They 
have also that other misery of packing and unpacking trunks 
— of running the distressing gauntlet of custom-houses — of 
the anxieties attendant upon getting a mass of baggage from 
point to point on land in safety. I had rather sail with a 
whole brigade of patriarchs than suffer so. We never packed 
our trunks but twice — when we sailed from New York, and 
when we returned to it. Whenever we made a land journey, 
we estimated how many days we should be gone and what 
amount of clothing we should need, figured it down to a math- 
ematical nicety, packed a valise or two accordingly, and left 
the trunks on board. We chose our comrades from among our 
old, tried friends, and started. We were never dependent 
upon strangers for companionship. We often had occasion to 
pity Americans whom we found traveling drearily among 
strangers with no friends to exchange pains and pleasures 
with. Whenever we were coming back from a land journey, 
our eyes sought one thing in the distance first — the ship — and 
when we saw it riding at anchor with the flag apeak, we felt 
as a returning wanderer feels when he sees his home. When 
we stepped on board, our cares vanished, our troubles were at 
an end — for the ship was home to us. We always had the same 
familiar old state-room to go to, and feel safe and at peace and 
comfortable again. 

I have no fault to find with the manner in which our excur- 



650 CONCLUSION. 

sion was conducted. Its programme was faithfully carried out 
— a thing which surprised me, for great enterprises usually 
promise vastly more than they perform. It would be well if 
such an excursion could be gotten up every year and the sys- 
tem regularly inaugurated. Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigot- 
ry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it" 
sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views 
of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one 
little corner of the earth all one's lifetime. 

The Excursion is ended, and has passed to its place among 
the things that were. But its varied scenes and its manifold 
incidents will linger pleasantly in our memories for many a 
year to come. Always on the wing, as we were, and merely 
pausing a moment to catch fitful glimpses of the wonders of 
half a world, we could not hope to receive or retain vivid im- 
pressions of all it was our fortune to see. Yet our holyday 
flight has not been in vain — for above the confusion of vague 
recollections, certain of its best prized pictures lift themselves 
and will still continue perfect in tint and outline after their 
surroundings shall have faded away. 

We shall remember something of pleasant France ; and 
something also of Paris, though it flashed upon us a splendid 
meteor, and was gone again, we hardly knew how or where. 
We shall remember, always, how we saw majestic Gibraltar 
glorified with the rich coloring of a Spanish sunset and swim- 
ming in a sea of rainbows. In fancy we shall see Milan again, 
and her stately Cathedral with its marble wilderness of grace- 
ful spires. And Padua — Verona — Como, jeweled with stars ; 
and patrician Venice, afloat on her stagnant flood — silent, des- 
olate, haughty — scornful of her humbled state — wrapping her- 
self in memories of her lost fleets, of battle and triumph, and 
all the pageantry of a glory that is departed. 

We can not forget Florence — Naples — nor the foretaste of 
heaven that is in the delicious atmosphere of Greece — and 
surely not Athens and the broken temples of the Acropolis. 
Surely not venerable Rome — nor the green plain that com- 
passes her round about, contrasting its brightness with her 



CONCLUSION. 651 

gray decay — nor the ruined arches that stand apart in the 
plain and clothe their looped and windowed raggedness with 
rines. We shall remember St. Peter's : not as one sees it 
when he walks the streets of Kome and fancies all her domes 
are just alike, but as he sees it leagues away, when every 
meaner edifice has faded out of sight and that one dome looms 
superbly up in the flush of sunset, full of dignity and grace, 
strongly outlined as a mountain. 

We shall remember Constantinople and the Bosporus — the 
colossal magnificence of Baalbec — the Pyramids of Egypt — 
the prodigious form, the benignant countenance of the Sphynx 
— Oriental Smyrna — sacred Jerusalem — Damascus, the " Pearl 
of the East," the pride of Syria, the fabled Garden of Eden, 
the home of princes and genii of the Arabian Nights, the old- 
est metropolis on earth, the one city in all the world that has 
kept its name and held its place and looked serenely on while 
the Kingdoms and Empires of four thousand years have risen 
to life, enjoyed their little season of pride and pomp, and then 
ranished and been forgotten ! 




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